As the coronavirus outbreak continues Living Well Sefton wants to reassure local residents that support is still available to them.

Our partners, both core and neighbourhood partners, can offer telephone support for your health and wellbeing.

As the Feelgood Factory in Netherton points out, the coronavirus outbreak isn’t just threatening our physical health, it also having an effect on our mental health too. So we need to look after it.

If you are isolated due to the present situation, or worried about becoming isolated, you can contact the Feelgood Factory on 0151 291 8010 between 10am and 3pm, Monday to Friday, for a chat and any information you may require for support.

If you can’t speak to someone direct then you can leave a brief message including your name and contact number, and they will get back to you as soon as possible.

One of Living Well Sefton’s other partners, Smokefree Sefton – the local specialist stop smoking service – continues to help smokers to quit during this difficult time.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and Public Health England (PHE) have identified smokers to be more vulnerable to COVID 19 for multiple reasons including:

• the act of smoking means that fingers are in contact with the lips which increases the risk of transmitting the disease from hand to mouth
• Smokers lung capacity will already be reduced and therefore will be more at risk of serious illness

Colette Kearney, Service Manager, explains: “To protect our clients we are unable to offer face-to-face support. However, all our staff are continuing to support clients weekly by telephone six days a week including evenings and at times to suit clients.

“In addition, motivational text messages will be sent between telephone calls to help clients.”

The 12 weeks of support the service offers includes nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) which will be free to all and securely posted or directly delivered to the client. Other prescribed stop smoking medication will be sourced from the client’s GP as appropriate.

Pregnant women will continue to be supported by the service’s Specialist Pregnancy advisor.

To contact Smokefree Sefton, ring 0300 100 1000.

For details on how our partners can support you, contact the Living Well Sefton team on 0300 323 0181 or email: LWS@seftoncvs.org.uk