Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust is proud to join forces with Nottinghamshire Disability Football Focus Group, Nottinghamshire FA, Nottingham University and Arnold Town Football Club to hold Positive Goals Football Festival on Thursday 16 April 2009. The event marks the start of a new county-wide mental health league which will be the 3rd largest league of its kind in the country after London and Manchester with 12 teams participating.
The event will be hosted at Arnold Town FC’s new state of the art home – Eagle Valley and will be an opportunity for mental health service users to showcase their football skills with support from staff and some current and former professional footballers. The Football Festival will be attended by Vernon Coaker, MP.
It’s a well researched and documented fact that exercise has a positive impact on mental healthcare but exercise or going to the gym can seem a bit daunting. Playing football has been found to improve and maintain such things as fitness, concentration, and engagement and can help develop social networking. Recent research showed that often men do not see playing football as “exercise” and Peter Evans’ experience of running a football league in Manchester showed that many young men approached playing with the attitude “ I don’t do exercise . . but I’ll play football.” This response has been reported anecdotally by staff in this Trust who are using the playing of football as part of their interventions.
At present throughout Nottinghamshire there are ad hoc pockets of very good practice but these are often reliant on the goodwill of clinical staff and are not sustained through a coherent strategy or well evaluated. A Trust strategy is being proposed, and funding is being sought, to develop a strategy across the Trust that uses football as a vehicle for delivering some aspects of mental health care.
The strategy is being developed by a steering group of clinicians, service users, managers and other people actively using football in clinical settings. Staff delivering interventions will be supported in carrying out evaluation of their work by Dr Alan Pringle at the University of Nottingham.
A part of this strategy is the setting up of a football league for service user teams across the county run in collaboration with Andrew Muldoon and his staff at Arnold Town FC and based at their stadium which is located between Nottingham and Mansfield. The proposal is that the club would supply coaching and skills training to service user teams and host a monthly meeting at which teams would play each other in a league.
If you would like to know more about the Positive Football Festival or about the proposed strategy, please contact:
James Doyle : Disability Football Development Officer, Nottinghamshire Football Association, Unit 6b, Chetwynd Business Park, Chilwell, Nottingham, NG9 6RZ Tel: 0115 9837412 Mob: 07866 914 470
Andrew Muldoon : First Team Manager, Arnold Town FC, Eagle Valley, Oxton Road, Arnold, Nottingham NG5 8PS Tel:- 0115 965 6000
Alan Pringle : Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing, University of Nottingham, Kings Mill Hospital, Mansfield Road, Sutton-in-Ashfield, Notts Tel 01623 465600 Mob 07973 230894
