Analysis: a recent survey of 239 Irish sports clubs found a range of actions were required to address health promotion
By Aurélie Van Hoye and Catherine Woods, UL
Sport clubs welcome approximately 96 million participants across Europe, making them a unique place to support people growth and develop. Indeed, sports clubs' core business is about providing opportunity for people to practice physical activity, which is recognised a key factor in preventing obesity and chronic disease. Sport practice as a contributor to physical activity practice has been identified as a major factor positively influencing participants' mental, physical, social and community health.
But sports clubs are also places where unhealthy behaviours could take place, especially in regards to eating, alcohol consumption, case of harassment or violence. Different scientists have flagged the "myth of healthism" in sport, highlighting the important benefits of physical activity, in an unhealthy environment in regard to other health behaviours.
Policy-makers at European level launched a call in 2007 to address the unexploited health promotion potential of sports clubs. This call has not been answered, as only 26% of European countries reported having health promoting programs in sport in place in the last European Union physical activity monitoring framework survey, a survey used to monitor the implementation of physical activity policies in European countries. Moreover, this indicator is one of the few which is not progressing in the last decade.
What support do sports clubs look for?
Our research team addressed the following question: what do sports clubs need to address health promotion and how to close this gap? A recent study among 239 Irish sports clubs found they would like support from their national governing bodies, local health executive services and local sports partnerships to be able to put health promotion on their agenda and foster discussion in the club on how to insert health promotion in their development plan.
They would also like ready to use signage and dissemination materials, as well toolkit for event organisation from Sport Ireland and their national governing bodies to develop health promotion activities. Finally, monitoring and surveys to evaluate the impact of their health promotion activities was requested.
What do international and national governing bodies need to do?
Looking for answer from stakeholders among international and national governing bodies, a recent literature review collating 35 studies worldwide has identified major barriers hindering them to promote health. The five most important factors were (1) the lack of qualified volunteers, (2) the lack of knowledge on how to implement health promotion (what to do, how to do it), (3) lack of financing from National Governing Bodies to sports clubs to put the activities in place, (4) lack of high quality information from international guidelines, (5) habits of the sports movement to work on a reactive manner, from crisis to crisis and not on a proactive way.
Do national public policies answer to sports club’s request?
Searching how to answer best to these requests, we extensively consulted the Irish national public policies, to find what kind of support sports clubs could benefit from the Irish decision-makers. A systematic search was undertaken on the website collating Irish policy documents, and interviews were undertaken with 11 decision-makers. We identified 49 actions in 17 policy documents across six sectors: sport and health being the biggest contributor, but also education, justice, rural development, children and youth.
Among the reviewed actions, most of them focused on physical activity promotion (13), women in sport (8) and disabled participation in sport (8), which comes back to the question of sport being open to promote other behaviour than physical activity. Moreover, no monitoring system for evaluation was in place, no national coordination and no campaign or event serving advocacy. Finally, almost half of the actions were dedicated to education or knowledge enhancement, which is not directly aligned with sports club’s request mentioned earlier.
How to tackle this multi-level challenge?
As a result of a Marie Curie Fellowship funded by the European Commission, our team has created toolkits usable by different actors, in collaboration with experts and the World Health Organisation. The e-PROSCeSS tool helps to assess the perceptions of sports club’s managers, coaches and participants of health promotion.
The health promoting sports federation guidelines will be released shortly and will help international and national governing bodies evaluate their actions regarding health promotion, but also find tools and strategies to apply. The Health Promoting Sports Clubs National Audit Tool is dedicated to national policy-makers and help to comprehensively review the public government support to sports clubs.
Dr Aurélie Van Hoye is Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Department of Physical Education and Sport Sciences at the University of Limerick and Associate Professor at the Université de Lorraine. Prof Catherine Woods is Chair of Physical Activity for Health in the Department of Physical Education and Sport Sciences at the University of Limerick. She is a former Irish Research Council awardee.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
