Health Promoting Sports Club in Practice: A Controlled Evaluation of the GAA Healthy Club Project.

Aoife Lane,David Callaghan,Colin Regan,Niamh Murphy

doi:10.3390/ijerph18094786

Abstract

Sport is a developing setting and a relevant system in health promotion but there are few examples of settings-based initiatives and systems thinking in sport. The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) Healthy Club Project (HCP) adopts a settings approach delivered through and by grassroots clubs who respond to local needs while working within a national support system. The aim of this evaluation was to assess and describe the health promotion impact and experience of the HCP. Healthy Clubs (n = 23) and Control Clubs (n = 10) completed a Healthy Club Questionnaire at the start and end of the 20-month HCP and Healthy Clubs took part in focus group discussions. Healthy Clubs, using the structures of the HCP, a commitment to health and community engagement, demonstrated a significant improvement in their overall orientation to health promotion, which was not apparent in Control Clubs. The health promotion message is pervading into many aspects of the GAA club apart from that which relates to the day to day business of coaching and providing physical activity for all. The HCP represents health promotion activity embedded within and across systems, with further development and evaluation recommended to measure delivery and impact at the individual level, organisational, and wider societal levels.

Highlights

Accepted: 27 April 2021Settings are places and social contexts where people live and work, and where environmental, organisational and personal factors interact to impact health [1,2,3,4]
Appointed subgroup of the National Healthy Club Project (HCP) Steering Committee screened all applicants and selected clubs to participate using a previously defined selection process. This considered (i) previous health promotion activity, (ii) capacity to participate in the programme, and (iii) inclusion of a variety of Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) club contexts in relation to size and location
There were no differences in the descriptive characteristics of Healthy and Control Clubs who responded at baseline only compared to those who engaged at both time points

Summary

Introduction

Settings are places and social contexts where people live and work, and where environmental, organisational and personal factors interact to impact health [1,2,3,4]. Making these settings more supportive of population health is a long-held principle of health promotion [5]. The tendency is to adopt a passive rather than comprehensive approach to settings work [6] This conflicts with our understanding of community settings as highly complex open systems within which polices are implemented, and where leverage points for enacting changes in the health of the community are often outside of the particular setting itself [7]. There is much in common with ecological models in health promotion, but systems thinking goes further by focusing on a system’s relationships and conditions and its processes of engagement and collaboration [7,9,10]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion