From a 16-week wait to a 4-week wait: Sport for Confidence's story with Heidi

Sport for Confidence is an occupational therapy-led organisation working at the intersection of health, sport, and physical activity. Around 52 staff, more than 20 of them OTs, use physical activity as a clinical tool for assessment and intervention, across a caseload with no exclusion criteria. More than 80% of the people they see live with three or more long-term health conditions. Their focus sits deliberately in the gap the system usually misses: reaching people before a crisis, not after one.

A model built from lived experience

Lyndsey, Lead Occupational Therapist, has spent 26 years in occupational therapy. Before beginning her career, she was a successful athlete, representing her country in netball. In her early twenties, a rare autoimmune illness brought that chapter of her life to an abrupt end, leaving her seriously unwell and unable to carry out everyday activities independently and requiring many months of treatment and rehabilitation.

Experiencing healthcare from the perspective of a patient, and the impact that losing independence can have, fundamentally shaped Lyndsey's approach to care. It reinforced her belief that lived experience is essential in designing services that are compassionate, person-centred and focused on what matters most to the people who use them.

After 16 years in the NHS, she founded the Sport for Confidence model, driven by a simple conviction: people at greatest risk of social exclusion should be supported before they reach crisis, not afterwards.

An independent evaluation by the University of Essex and funded by Sport England has since supported the effectiveness of the model, reflecting the impact Lyndsey had witnessed throughout her years in practice.

Finding Heidi

Lyndsey, first heard about Heidi Scribe through a GP friend in New Zealand, one of Heidi's earliest users in the region. Her first reaction was hesitation, not excitement. She worried that AI might get in the way of clinical reasoning, especially for OTs early in their careers who were still building that judgement.

She tested Scribe on herself before asking anyone else to. What she found was the opposite of what she'd feared: more time actually connecting with the person in front of her, less time lost to admin afterward. Scribe became her way in, capturing individual sessions and holistic assessments through a custom template she built for her own practice.

From there, she started using Heidi Evidence alongside it. When a conversation with a family called for research on the spot, like the benefits of swimming for people who've experienced psychosis, she could pull it up mid-conversation and show them the source directly rather than promising to follow up later.

Rolling Heidi out to the wider team wasn't a straight line. Group presentations didn't land. What worked instead was sitting down one-to-one with each OT and learning it together, session by session, experimentally.

The more Lyndsey relied on Heidi, the more she noticed what Scribe's session-by-session model couldn't reach. Team briefs, supervisions, the ad hoc conversation with a carer in a corridor: none of it fit inside a booked session, and none of it was getting written down anywhere. That's what took her to Heidi Remote, worn continuously through the day rather than switched on and off around appointments.

The result has been measurable. Sport for Confidence's early help waiting list has dropped from 16 weeks to 4, with Heidi cited as a key factor.

A day with Heidi Remote

Heidi Remote goes wherever Lyndsey does. Worn around the neck through the day, it captures team briefs, patient sessions, supervisions, and the ad hoc conversations with carers that never used to make it into any note at all. At the end of the day, she downloads every session, transfers her notes, and deletes what doesn't need to be kept.

Lyndsey is now looking to extend Remote to every OT and OT assistant on the team.