We are Telford and Wrekin’s Healthy Families Team. We work in local schools and community venues offering free one-to-one appointments with families who would like support with being healthier. We look at setting achievable, realistic goals to help families make dietary changes, improve physical activity or a combination of both.

Families can contact us directly to book an appointment, and we also accept referrals from other professionals such as GPs, school nurses, schoolteachers, and more. 

Who do we support?

We support families and children under the age of 16 who are above a healthy weight for their age and height.

If you want to check whether your child is a healthy weight, you can use the NHS BMI centile calculator.

Healthy weight is determined by age, gender, height and weight. To use the calculator you will need to input your child’s date of birth, sex at birth, height and weight.

What happens when a family makes contact?

We will contact you to discuss our programme and to make sure we are the right service to support you. If not, we can signpost you to other services who might be able to help. If you feel we can help you and your family, we will book an initial one-hour telephone appointment.

During this appointment we will talk about the foods that you eat, what activity you do, and any challenges you may face. We use this information to help us advise on the best changes, swaps and goals for you to work towards. It’s important for us that the goals set are decided by you and your family.

We will then book a face-to-face appointment with you, either at your child’s school or a local community venue. We will do a growth check during this appointment, where we take height and weight measurements, (we find this works well where the family gets involved and you all have the opportunity to have your measurements done too).We will also review the goals we set with you to see how you’re getting on with the changes/swaps. Sometimes they’ll have been easy to do, sometimes they’ll need to be adjusted – this is normal and completely fine! We’re here to support you and we know that sometimes life gets in the way.

Following this appointment there will be four more sessions. During our final session we’ll complete another growth check and review the final goals set. We may also signpost to other services if we feel this is appropriate.

We often get asked if Healthy Families is a weight loss programme for children – the answer is no. We’d like to explain how the programme is not just about the scales, and here are some of the things we’ve heard people say that we’d like to reassure you about:

‘You want my child to lose weight’

As a service we minimise how much we talk about weight loss with children; instead, we look at minimising weight gain. We know that children are going to grow taller as they get older so initially we aim to encourage families to help their children maintain their weight and to reduce any further weight gain. However, as families make changes and improve their lifestyle, weight loss can sometimes happen as a result.

‘You want to put my child on a diet’

We don’t look at diets and rarely talk about calories. We won’t put your child on any weight loss plan or special diet. We look at making realistic changes and swaps to help children and families achieve a more balanced diet. For instance, if your child has a standard sized chocolate bar a day, we may suggest reducing this during the week. We don’t encourage cutting out foods completely because this is normally unrealistic and doesn’t help when it comes to making lasting changes.

‘You will talk about weight and I don’t want my child to hear that’

We use language that encourages families to think about healthy bodies, healthy minds and a balanced lifestyle rather than weight alone. We use the term growth check instead of a weight check for this reason.

Many of the changes we can make to our lifestyle have a positive impact on our mindset, wellbeing, physical health and not just our weight.

‘I don’t want to attend a group with my child’

Our appointments are one-to-one with individual families so the session you attend will be tailored to you and your family only.  

‘You are going to set me and my family goals we can’t achieve’

This is an important one to us! The goals set are always discussed with you and your family. We don’t tell you what to do, instead we work with you to decide what you can do. We know that if we are told what to do, we often react negatively to this, or we may think “who are they to tell me I need to do that, they don’t know my life or my circumstances”. Therefore, we spend time getting to know you so we can make realistic suggestions and come up with agreed goals.

The Healthy Families Team