Graham Stephens

Graham has been a specialist (professionally) in sport along with health and wellbeing for over 40 years. A key component within his work has been, and still is, long term lifestyle behaviour change, often in unusual settings. As he would say “with both feet on the ground”.

His passion has always been the facilitation of positive lifestyle behaviour change, at EVERY level. Graham’s love of a challenge in this field has led him to work with some of the most extreme difficult groups, not least, Manchester’s youth gang scene (typically 15-17) with amazing results over a nine-year period. This included areas such as Moss Side and Longsight. He was also the lead developer and innovator for Wigan and Leigh’s NHS Trust GP exercise referral scheme which set not only new methodology but changed the early retention figures (at one year) for such schemes from 8 to 11% to figures way beyond 60%. During the late 80’s and early 90’s he developed a modifiable health risk and lifestyle assessment tool which was assessed and approved for use by Manchester University for the Wigan and Leigh NHS scheme. The tool uses a picture based format along with narrative medicine combined with a motivational interviewing style and is known as L.A.K.E. The key aspects are; Lifestyle, Attitude (Intrinsic – Extrinsic), Knowledge and finally External Influence.