A THREEYEAR INTERVENTION STUDY OF INCREAS

1
A THREE-YEAR INTERVENTION STUDY OF INCREAS- ING
ADAPTED PHYSICAL ACTIVITY IN 13 MUNICIPAL- ITIES
IN FINLAND Piispanen Toni1, Koivumäki Kari2,
Rovio Esa1, Rintala Pauli3, Keskinen Kari L.1
(Finnish Society of Sport Sciences1, Ministry of
Education2, University of Jyväskylä3, Finland)
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the
effects of a three-year intervention study in 13
municipalities in promot-ing Adapted Physical
Activity (APA) during the years 2004-06. Similar
to most European countries, about 25 of
Fin-lands population are persons with a
disability, including a number of persons with
chronic illnesses and elderly peo-ple with
special needs for physical activity services.
There are about 90 sports instructors for these
groups hired by the local sport offices in
municipalities. However, a lack of sports
instructors is one of the biggest problems in the
field of APA in Finland. For the most part these
instructors supervise and organize fitness
training for persons with dis-abilities, persons
with chronic illnesses and elderly citizens.
Municipal-level activities have been complemented
by ac-tivities of sports organizations for
persons with disabilities mostly avoiding
duplication of efforts. There are approx-imately
3.000 municipally coordinated weekly groups for
adapted physical activity. About 80.000 persons
participate in these groups. However, the quality
of locally directed ac-tivities varies a lot
depending on the amount of citizens and on
geographical location of municipalities. The
level of or-ganized activities in some
municipalities can be very high but in some
municipalities very low. The inclusion crite-ria
were simply that APA was poorly organized and
there were no employees in this field. The
project offered only modest financial support.
Instead, thorough consultation and individualised
training in the chosen field was given to persons
in charge of operations within the
municipalities. Consequently, these
municipalities were able to build up proper
action plans and find workable solutions to
locally upcoming problems. The results indicated
that three years is enough to increase APA
significantly in these municipal-ities. The
project group could establish a total of seven
new positions for sports instructors. In the
municipalities established 169 new APA groups
(56 increase). Amount of sport participants
increased from 2898 to 5098 (76). We conclude
that the project was successful in establishing
both new activities and new jobs in the area of
APA as well as in creating good practices to be
utilised further in the municipalities. We also
noticed that locally directed APA groups require
only a relatively modest financial support to be
able to carry out activities. Even a small
municipal APA budget may have significant
influence on an effective sports and recreational
activity programme. Keywords Adapted Physical
Activity 12thAnnual Congress of the ECSS, 1114
July 2007, Jyväskylä, Finland I