Sport for health – Slovenia (SloMSIC)

Name of the activity: Sport for health

Country/NMO: Slovenia (SloMSIC)

Program: Healthy Lifestyles & Non-Communicable Diseases

Type of the activity: Sport activity

General description:

Our project tries to promote awareness of healthy lifestyle to every medical student at our faculty. Even more, we all try to do our best to promote healthy way of living to every resident in the town. We are aware that only healthy, fit, full of energy and motivated medical student can do his or her best. Therefore, we try to maintain our bodies and minds in a healthy state. Our project provides and organizes many different activities. We organize skiing twice a year, hiking and trekking trips, picnics where all medical students gather, make new friendships and spend quality friendship time. Our members can also take part in monthly conferences and they can attend a marathon called Batatek, which takes place in the Netherlands. Every year we also attend Wings for Life World Run. We also provide weekly gym sessions.
Only healthy and fit medical student can promote healthy lifestyle, so we try to do our best to promote healthy lifestyle.

Focus area:

Prevention of NCDs and Health Promotion

Problem statement:

The main problem that we want to address is lack of physical activity and lack of socializing. We have observed that the majority of medical students do not have time for physical activity and socializing beyond our medical faculty. We want to address this problem with the ability to provide activities that connect medical students and also connect them in their free time. We hope that these behavioural patterns will help them in the future to live healthier and help them socialize.
(http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3200/JACH.55.2.77-82, http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/43/2/89.short )

Target groups and beneficiaries:

We will mostly interact with medical students, but in the future we hope that we will also be able to involve other medical profesionals. Our activities also involve and help connect people who are in their free time involved in mountain rescue and also help educate our student on this field. Those who will directly benefit from our activities in the long run will be medical students, but in the long run we hope that this will lead to healthier health proffesionals. It is also proven that doctors who are healthier have better results with patiente adherence.

Objectives and indicators of success:

Our smart goal would be to increase participation on our events. We want to increase the amount of participants from 10% to 20%. We will try to achieve this goal with promotions on fb, mail and other social platforms. We think that this goal is achievable for us, because last year was the first active year of our project. We hope to achieve this goal by the end of this calendar year.

Methodology:

Our objectives are straight-forward. Each month there is at least one activity, which contributes to achieving our goals and objectives. These activities include skiing, hiking, weekly gym sessions, an activity called Gorski utrip, attending a marathon called Batatek, organization of a picnic for all students of Faculty of Medicine in Maribor and monthly conferences with renowned speakers and great audience and other activites. We organise skiing twice a year, once in March and the second one in December. We visit foreign or local ski slopes which gives a variety of different options to choose and thus making this activity very interesting every year. This year we are introducing weekly gym sessions in a local sport center in order to maintain our bodies in a healthy state and thus prepared for exams throughout the semester. The organisation of picnic is also a great project. There are two picnic each year, one in May and the second one in October. The attendance of the both picnics is very high because they provides a quality friendship time. There is also a lot of food, which cooked by our students.

Plans for evaluation:

We are keeping track of every activity we have done in the past year. This data includes the number of attendees on an activity, the financial plan and the success of the activity. Every year we try to compare the results of every last year’s activity with this year’s activity. The result of evaluation is positive if we exceeded last year’s number of attendees and if we spend less money for that activity, however it has to be positively rated by the attendees on a particular activity. Usually, after the activity, we put out a poll for the attendees so they can cast a vote about what they think about that activity, what was good or bad, what would they change if they could and the last question regarding their next year’s attendance on this activity. The finances play a big role in this game. We try to keep the costs at it’s minimum and after all provide special experience to all of the guests.