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Congratulations to Aurélie Van Hoye who gave an excellent public lecture, entitled “Promoting health in sports clubs in Ireland: lessons learnt from a Marie Curie Fellowship” on the 9th of May 2023 at the Physical Education and Sport Sciences Department.
During her talk, Aurélie presented her journey over the 18 months of her project, which focused on identifying support for health promotion policy development in sports clubs. Five studies were presented, highlighting both a top-down approach based on national policy and GAA healthy club project implementation by the Community and Health Department, as well as a bottom-up approach, investigating how healthy clubs implement health promotion policies and Irish sports clubs' needs in regard to health promotion policies. The final study is grounded on achievement and pitfalls identified in the four first ones, consisting of the creation of the health-promoting sports federation implementation guidance, issued by a collaboration with the World Health Organisation.
Results of the project can be found on www.healthpromotingsportsclub.com.
This research calls for three practical implications: (1) a better consideration of health promotion as an umbrella concept under which to tackle specific health topics (e.g. doping, violence prevention, addiction…), (2) more recognition of sports clubs as a setting in policy (similar to schools, workplaces or cities) and (3) a better empowerment of national sports federation as key stakeholders supporting volunteer-run sports clubs.