Students win grant to make their project a reality

Four first year Sport and Exercise Science BSc(Hons) students have won an ECHO Grant to make their Fitness Fights Falls project a reality.

The project is to design and implement a falls prevention programme to help the local Eastbourne community where their course is based. In the UK, falls are the most common cause of injury related deaths in people over the age of 75. Student Jessie Payne told us about the planned project and pitching for the grant:

“We first heard about the project when Robert Harley mentioned it to his tutor group last year. Once we showed an interest in the project all four of us met on several occasions with Robert, Louisa Beale and Peter Watt all lecturers at the university who had an idea for the project but hadn’t yet decided on details of arrangements and how it would be run.

“They came to realise it would be great to have it as a student led project, getting us active in the local community and having our own learning experience enhanced. We then decided that we would go for the ECHO grant after doing a piece of research and finding out from the local care homes the need for a project like ours.

“We are hoping to study a postural stability three-day course provided by Later Life Training this summer so everything is in place so we can start up the pilot falls interventions classes in the beginning of our second year; if all goes ahead as planned we will then be able to run it again in our third year.

“We are aiming to run the classes at two different local care homes who have already shown interest in the project after filling in our questionnaire – we have already visited one of them to talk to them about the need of the classes and they have agreed it crucial. One care home let us know that she had a physiotherapist come in once a month to complete similar exercises but evidence suggests that for these exercise programs to be effective they need to be hosted two to three days per week. Because of this we are hoping that two of us will go to one care home twice a week and two of us to another care home twice a week. For the classes to go ahead there needs to be one trained instructor and we are hoping that along the line we will get other student volunteers as they can also help if a trained person is present.

“The care home has said they currently would pay for similar classes and after the pilot study we would hope that the care homes will then pay for our classes aiming at around £5 per person which would go into a fund for future students to the get the training.

“Once further research into the running of the project had been done it became clear that we would have to take external training to become qualified to teach these classes. The ECHO grant fund has made it possible for all of us to have this training meaning we can teach these classes multiple times a week at different care homes.

“We think it is such an amazing project to get involved in to help the local community and expand on our learning alongside our degree course.”

Lecturer Louisa Beale, deputy course leader, said: “This project gives our students the opportunity to provide support for health-related activities for elderly people in the local community. It will give them new skills and a qualification to complement their academic learning.

“They are a group of motivated and enthusiastic students who, with the support of their tutors have already worked hard to plan this project and secure the funding.”