CN240225 Relationships with Food

This is a market engagement event to support and help shape a new service that Kent County Council intends to procure in the future. The service will serve the population of Kent County Council and will be titled ‘Relationships with Food’.

We are seeking organisations and individuals with experience in this sector to join a market engagement event to hear about the planned service and to provide your views and experiences on our plans.

We would like your opinions and thoughts on what would make the opportunity attractive to you, the barriers to tendering, the specification, and anything else that would be useful in refining the opportunity. Feedback collected during the event will be used to refine the service specifications and procurement approach.

This is a different model intended for families and their children, enabling and supporting families to develop an increased understanding of their relationship with food rather than focusing on weight management. Our relationships with food are complex, and our life experiences are embedded within them. This will be exciting and challenging to deliver.

As clinical psychologists, food psychologists, mental health practitioners, nutritionists, dieticians, or website and app designers, you will bring a range of valuable and important skills to develop and deliver this new service. It is designed to bring a different response, so we understand the way we access and eat food, which empowers us to make different decisions.

The service will work as a team supporting families in the districts where we have a higher prevalence of child obesity, but the service will not focus on weight loss as an immediate outcome. You will also work with women postnatally. The trust you build in groups or individual work, and the move onward to access resources and communications/updates through an app and a website, will help progress someone's mindset changes and, in turn, behaviour change. You will be flexible in your approach to meet the differing needs of our population, including children in deep poverty and those who are neurodivergent.

The market engagement event will be held on the 25th of November 2024 from 11 am to 12 pm. Depending on availability, we may also offer one-to-one 10-minute slots as an opportunity to offer further feedback between 12 pm to 1 pm on the 25th of November 2024.

To register your interest in the market engagement event, please email Craig.Barden@kent.gov.uk by the 21st of November 2024, including the following information:

• Name
• Job title
• Organisation
• Email address (if applying for more than one individual to attend).

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You will then receive a Teams meeting invite.