Health: South Manchester Healthy Living Network

South Manchester Healthy Living Network and WFM collaborated to produce the weekly health show Good Life, which covers everything from coronary heart disease, stroke prevention and breast cancer, to head lice and sexual health.

The programme is produced and presented not by health professionals but by a team of local residents who were recruited from the network's "Discovery Team" of unemployed volunteers, and then trained by Radio Regen.

Nigar Sadique says Good Life has proved a useful device in achieving the network's goals by ensuring health information reaches the people of Wythenshawe in their own voice.

"We don't use jargon. The volunteers choose the issues to be discussed and talk in their own language, which makes it accessible. We identify a good guest speaker and go out in the community and do vox pops on the week's topic," she says

The programme also draws on the knowledge of the hundred-plus local organisations that form the network, which was set up by South Manchester Primary Care Trust and Manchester City Council to help communities identify and deal with health problems. Members range from support groups to youth centres, GPs surgeries and alternative therapists.

Calls to Good Life from listeners demonstrate that their health advice is reaching its target. Nigar gives the example a caller who was struggling to look after an epileptic daughter: the show linked him up with a carer support group and day-care centre.

Meanwhile, a spin-off is that the volunteers have also benefited. "Their confidence levels have increased and it has led them on to other things with three of our volunteers having found employment since their radio training."