Short abstract
Glossy magazine launched to promote healthy lifestyles
Last week health secretary John Reid visited a north London swimming pool to launch a new glossy lifestyle magazine. Your Life! looks like the real thing. There is a soap star turned singer and a magic diet on the cover. Rock star Ms Dynamite pouts inside. And it fits in your handbag. But Your Life! is not the real thing. It is a health promotion magazine—21st century patient information about how to look after yourself, live longer, and find a smoking cessation clinic when you need one.
Your Life! is free and funded jointly by the Department of Health and 75 primary care trusts. It is produced by Dr Foster, independent publishers best known for their consumer guides to health care. All three are hoping that 24 pages of celebrities doing what they do best (talking about themselves) will reach parts of the population traditional health promotion campaigns have failed to reach—mainly teenage girls and young mums. Lead features include Chris Eubank, retired boxer and eccentric, on how to bring up children; Amanda Mealing, an actress, talking about her breast cancer; and Ricky Tomlinson, a sitcom star, describing his eczema.
There are also eight pages of copy customised to fit the local demographics, and incorporating information about local health services—the kind of information that is usually posted through people's letterboxes and then ignored. Your Life! is certainly shinier, bouncier, and more appealing than a leaflet. The production is slick and the copy is jauntily written and easy to read. It speaks directly to readers and gives them what they want: diets, babies, stars, and sex.
After a few minutes wallowing in the detail of other people's lives, however, you begin to notice the public health messages. At first they are unobtrusive, almost subliminal; a small list of “health points” after every recipe, or a dietician's carefully framed warning about the dangers of daft diets in a feature called “incredible shrinking stars.” Then the messages get louder and louder. Stop smoking! Don't drink so much! Whatever you do don't throw your life away having a baby at 15! But if you must, make sure that you breast feed your baby and protect him or her with a life saving (and not at all dangerous) MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine! In the end, I couldn't read the features without looking for the punchline first, just to get it over with.
Will young girls fall for it? Or is it impossible to make health promotion sexy, exciting, and readable without pretending that it is something else? It reminded me of hiding worming pills in cat food, or medicine in babies' milk. Even the producers, Dr Foster, describe the magazine as a Trojan horse. Exploiting the cult of celebrity to promote healthier lifestyles is also risky. Celebrities are notoriously unhealthy people who smoke to lose weight, inject neurotoxins into their facial wrinkles, and regularly wash out their colons with salty water.
Figure 1.
Will young girls fall for it?
Still, Your Life! looks so different from most dreary NHS publications that it must be worth a try, as long as the DoH remains realistic about what the magazine is trying to achieve. If it works, similar projects for men might follow.
But can it work? The first step will be to put the magazine where people are likely to see it. About half of each print run of 20 000 copies will go in general practice surgeries, hospital clinics, and other health outlets. The other half is destined for the high street. The local primary care trust will decide on distribution based on local knowledge and demographics. Hairdressers, nail salons, tanning studios, leisure centres, and supermarkets are all possible venues.
The project costs just over £500 000 ($907 000; €727 000), which is much less than the cost of a national advertising campaign on television or billboards. The DoH contributed £175 000, the rest came from participating primary care trusts. Dr Foster calculates that each primary care trust pays about 27p for each copy of Your Life! Rachael Tyndall, chief executive of Islington's primary care trust, considers that good value compared with the cost (and pointlessness) of posting leaflets through people's doors.
A second issue for spring is already on the way. What happens after that will depend on the continuing support of primary care trusts, and the enthusiasm of their patients.