To celebrate National Walking Month, Gateshead Health held a Step Count Challenge. One of three winning teams were Mac’s Marchers, a group of 5 colleagues from Older Person’s Mental Health – who ran out winners of the 10,000 daily target step count with a mammoth 2,927,166 steps – enough to win the league above them had they switched it up!

The motivation for the hefty tally explained by the winning team – formed of Sophie, Katy, Alex, Emily and Vic, who on receipt of their prize explained: “We chose to name our team in honour of a great colleague and friend who loves walking for miles. Mac was regularly posting more than 50,000 steps a day back in the 2023 step challenge, so with health reasons preventing him from joining a team this year, we decided to team up, motivate each other and push each other in to do it for Mac, making him an honorary 6th member of the group.

“Our initial aim was to compete in the 10,000 steps per day league and push ourselves to add an extra 2000 per day. But he’s extremely competitive and we managed to channel our inner Mac even on the days when the motivation wasn’t quite there to push ourselves.

“We’re all thinking of you Mac, and every step was for you!”

Natalie Brown, a health and wellbeing ambassador in the area, said: “The team always go above and beyond and this is just another example of it. Working on the mental health inpatient wards always feels like you have a family who have your back no matter what.

“I think the way the team pulled together during the step challenge shows how much they think of each other. Across the wards we had a mixture of nursing staff, healthcares, medics, occupational therapists, pharmacy, psychology, ward clerks, housekeepers and consultant psychiatrists involved across different teams in the challenge. That just shows that we are an MDT in every sense of the term, where we all integrate and work together – not just for patients, but for each other too.”