Health & Wellbeing

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and Macmillan Cancer Support is urging the public to learn about the signs and symptoms of the UK’s most common type of cancer and signposting people affected by cancer to where they can find local support. The Macmillan mobile service is stopping off in the West Midlands on from Monday 5^th October to Thursday 8^th October. No appointment is necessary, and anyone is welcome.

A mobile stop smoking clinic and quit and get fit yoga and pilates classes are just some of the activities taking place over the next month. Haringey’s ‘Stoptober’ campaign officially kicked off today with specialist stop smoking advisors outside Wood Green Library offering support to residents to set a quit date and to take advantage of a range of free support throughout ‘Stoptober’.

Aston Villa and Birmingham City supporters were being urged to put their rivalry to one side and unite in support of Cure Leukaemia’s ‘Just One More’ campaign at the eagerly-awaited Second City derby. Villa’s official charity, Villa in the Community, kindly agreed to back the Birmingham-based blood cancer charity’s attempts to raise at least £40,000 – the amount required to fund  specialist research nurse for a year – during September, which is Blood Cancer Awareness Month.

Diabetes UK is urging parents and students to nominate their schools for a special award that celebrates schools that provide great care and support to children and young people with Type 1 diabetes. The charity’s Good Diabetes Care in School Award is open to all schools across the Midlands. Schools can nominate themselves, or be nominated by parents, students and healthcare professionals.

People who are looking to quit smoking are being encouraged to sign up to this year’s Stoptober campaign with friends, family or work colleagues. Evidence shows “social quitting” – where groups collectively try to give up smoking – can dramatically improve people’s chances of successfully stopping.

Weight loss champion Councillor Paul Sweet has set his sights on tackling next year's Wolverhampton Marathon – after defying even his own expectations by completing the half-marathon last weekend. Councillor Sweet, the City of Wolverhampton Council's Cabinet Member for Governance, made it his ambition to take part in the half-marathon after embarking on a weight loss challenge last September.

Diabetes UK is recommending that Jewish people with diabetes talk with their rabbi ahead of the three major festivals in the coming weeks. Rosh Hashanah, on September 14-15, and Simchat Torah at the end of Sukkot, on October 6, are both traditionally celebrated by feasting.

QEHB Charity, the official charity of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, and UK military charity Help for Heroes recently joined forces to treat our troops to an exhilarating day of off-road driving, thanks to support from kind-hearted company Jaguar Land Rover. The automotive company kindly invited military personnel to take part in an Land Rover Experience off-road driving activity at its Solihull plant.

Cabinet Member for Health and Social Care, Cllr Paulette Hamilton, continues her quest to be more active by joining a free Tai Chi session in Cotteridge Park in her own words. Since becoming Cabinet member for Health and Social Care in May, I've been keen to promote the benefits of exercise and generally leading an active life.

The Let’s talk about Loneliness in the Community meeting, which is being organised by the Haringey Forum for Older People in conjunction with the council and Haringey Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), will encourage people to think about what steps can be taken to help people feel more connected to others in the local area and help to link vulnerable residents with sources of advice and support.

Birmingham health chiefs hope the forthcoming ban on smoking in cars carrying children will encourage more smokers to quit. The new legislation aims to protect young people under-18 from second-hand smoke and Cabinet member for Health and Social Care, Cllr Paulette Hamilton, believes it will make a massive difference to the lives of thousands of Birmingham children.

Sunday 6^th September saw 29 plucky men and women drop 150ft from the Hilton Hotel, Birmingham, in order to support patients at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham. Kelly Jackson, 26, who lost her leg in a 2013 road traffic accident, took the plunge in order to give back to all those who treated and supported her at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham through her traumatic injury.

As the nation commemorates the 75^th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, a new report from the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund, the RAF’s leading welfare charity, finds that significant numbers of RAF veterans both young and old are experiencing depression, loneliness, relationship troubles, and bereavement.  These concerns join self-care and mobility as the top welfare needs of the RAF veteran community. 

Friday, October 2nd marks the 18th annual Byte Night, a sponsored sleep out which sees more than 1,500 people across the UK spend the night exposed to the elements to raise money for Action for Children.  Over 230 sleepers have already pledged to take part in the 2015 Midlands event, to be held in St Paul’s Square, Birmingham

Adults in the West Midlands are taking 25 per cent fewer trips on foot compared with a decade ago, according to new data released today. The analysis, drawn by Diabetes UK from the National Travel Survey, reveals that local people made an average of 181 journeys every year by foot in 2013/14, a number that has gone down significantly since 2003/04 when 241 journeys were being made annually by foot, on average, in the West Midlands.

Diabetes UK is warning that children born to women with gestational diabetes are six times more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes later in life. The charity is urging women to try to make sure they are a healthy weight, which is the most important thing they can do to reduce their risk of gestational diabetes.