Sports Leaders UK offers free training for NHS

PRESS RELEASE Sports Leaders UK offers free training for NHS Sports Leaders UK has welcomed Health Secretary, Andy Burnham’s call to put physical activity on the NHS agenda and is offering free places to NHS staff on its Tutor Training courses for sports leadership. The charity has called Mr Burnham’s policy ‘a sensible move that shows a serious appreciation of the role of physical activity in the health of the nation’, and will reserve two places for NHS staff at every one of its Tutor Training courses until 2012. Sports Leaders UK engages 200,000 young people every year in leadership training; they go on to volunteer in community sports delivery, dramatically increasing the numbers involved in sport. Training tutors equips them to organise and deliver sporting activity in schools, community centres, colleges and with local authority schemes. The Health Secretary has called for significant improvements in activity levels, where Britain is 21st in Europe, and the promotion of active lifestyles as a core business of the NHS not a bolt on extra. “The Sports Leaders UK network of 4,000 registered training centres, 100 Outreach Centres and 200,000 trained volunteers every year offers a captive audience for active lifestyle messages,” said Michaela Hutchings, Sports Leaders UK, Head of Operations. “We have dance leadership qualifications which ties in well with the Dance Champions Group headed by Arlene Philips, our two expedition courses attract walkers, and we have even developed training for the elderly using WiiFit games. Sports Leaders deliver 20 per cent of the guided sport in Britain, some 700,000 hours a week; we are already a force for physical activity and I hope our training offer will help the NHS embed active lifestyles into its care package,” Ms Hutchings added. Sports Leaders UK has written to Mike Farrar, Chief Executive, NHS North West, who has been charged by Mr Burnham to embed physical activity across the NHS with details of its offer. August 20, 2009 Sports Leaders UK Public Relations Martin Cannon T: 01908 689212 E: media@sportsleaders.org