Using an Open Research approach to encouraging people to age well. What is Take5?

By Dr Katie Davis, Dr Jitka Vseteckova, Rachel Millar, Dr Sinead Eccles, Dr Sharon Davis

Take Five to Age Well (Take5) is a public health campaign based on inclusive, participatory principles, empowering people to adopt healthier behaviours. It focuses on improving health, enhancing self-management, and addressing inequalities. Participants pledge to act in five key areas: eating well, staying hydrated, staying active, connecting socially, and engaging in cognitive stimulation. Through a month-long commitment, Take5 combines self-care actions with motivation to establish lasting routines.  

Everyone desires to enjoy more time in good health. Science suggests that nearly all of us, regardless of our genetic makeup, can take simple, straightforward steps to improve our chances of living a longer, healthier life. While we cannot choose whether we age, we can choose how we age. Simple habits can help us remain strong, sharp, independent, and feeling good. Take Five to Age Well aims to empower individuals to adopt these habits over a month-long period and beyond. 

There are five areas where you can choose to form new habits: 

1. Eat: healthy eating can boost our longevity  
2.  Drink: stay well hydrated for healthy ageing  
3. Move: exercise boosts body and mind  
4. Connect and Engage: make and maintain social connections for your health  
5. Think: use your brain to stay sharp 

What is our reach? 

Take5 has a national reach across the four countries of the UK, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Currently we are partnered with Age UK in delivering the Take in May 2025. We collaborate with over 400 UK-wide organisations, who share and promote the campaign including local authorities, Age-UK network, NHS organisations, third sector partners and independent companies.   

Why is ‘Open research’ important and what did we do? 

We learned that it is important to employ a participatory and flexible approach that includes co-design and co-production to enable wide engagement in the development of preventative public health interventions such as Take5. This facilitates people ‘buying in’ to the campaign and fostering a long-term commitment. From the initial findings of Take5 in 2023, we found that nine months after the initial campaign, 87% of people were still doing the action they chose as part of their Take5 commitment four or more times a week.  

Our understanding is that tackling accessibility gaps is key to fostering initial participation and maintaining long-term dedication. To try and ensure accessibility for the widest audience, we used bite-size pieces of information, underpinned by behavioural science and shared in an accessible way (meeting people where they are) via a wide range of sources and platforms including email, social media and printable materials. This provided people with options and insights into what they might be interested in (such as pledge actions), creating something they recognise as beneficial for themselves.  

How we do it? 

Take5 is hosted on The Open University’s platform nQuire. nQuire is a citizenship science supportive platform which enabled us to share Take5 with over 300 partners in the four nations and also with over 3000 participants who signed up from all over the UK. We will be using nQuire again in May 2025 for the next run of the campaign.