What is MECC?
Making Every Contact Count (MECC) can lead to improvements in people’s health and well-being, reduce avoidable premature mortality linked to poor lifestyle choices, reduce health inequalities and help people better manage long term conditions.
The Fundamental idea under pinning MECC
The fundamental idea underpinning the MECC approach is simple. It recognises that staff across health, local authority and voluntary sectors, have thousands of contacts every day with individuals and are ideally placed to promote health and healthy lifestyles.
- For organisations, MECC means providing their staff with the leadership, environment, training and information that they need to deliver the MECC approach.
- For staff, MECC means having the competence and confidence to deliver healthy lifestyle messages, to help encourage people to change their behaviour and to direct them to local services that can support them.
- For individuals, MECC means seeking support and taking action to improve their own lifestyle by eating well, maintaining a healthy weight, drinking alcohol sensibly, exercising regularly, not smoking and looking after their wellbeing and mental health.
MECC focuses on the lifestyle issues that, when addressed, can make the greatest improvement to an individual’s health:
- Stopping smoking
- Drinking alcohol only within the recommended limits
- Healthy eating
- Being physically active
- Being aware of the importance of immunisations and vaccinations
- Improving mental health and wellbeing.
What MECC is not?
MECC is not about:
- adding another job to already busy working days
- staff becoming specialists or experts in certain lifestyle areas
- staff becoming counsellors or providing ongoing support to particular individuals
- staff telling somebody what to do and how to live their life.