Healthy Campus

In this blog post I will discuss point ten in the Healthy Campus ‘We will create or re-orient campus services to support equitable access and enhance the health and wellbeing of students and staff’. This was the point in the charter that stood out most to me, I believe that WIT is already making efforts towards this to make WIT a healthy campus. The first thing I think about when I read that point is the work and effort that is put In towards creating opportunities for students and promoting certain aspects of health around the college especially sexual health, the student’s union currently do a spectacular job in promoting sexual health and safe sex on campus by carrying out workshops and campaigns over the college year. Identifying further opportunities to promote and support the health and wellbeing of staff. By creating or re-orienting campus services it will strengthen opportunities for students and staff to do things that promote their own health and wellbeing. Currently the college is doing a good job in providing services that enhance the health and wellbeing of students and staff, in some areas such access to physical activity facilities in the college is a barrier to living a healthy life for students and staff. The main barrier to students joining and maintaining a healthy gym schedule is the location of the gym. Even though there is a bus going out to the gym which is 10 minutes out the road, the busses run on a hourly basis which can be awkward for students and staff that are under a strict timetable and want to get their exercise done in between classes and quickly. Finding motivation to go to the gym and keep it up can be difficult but barriers like location and time would overtime result in memberships being wasted. For students and staff that drive or are living near by the gym it would be more convenient but most students rely on public transport such as the bus.
Implementing better physical activity services in the college may be hard, especially trying to change the bus timetable to more frequent times as the demand would not be high. Re-orientating the location of the college gym would be an extreme cost and locating a new facility closer to the gym would be tough. I think the best option is to create more on campus physical activities such as gym classes, the facilities are there and can be used such as the dance studio and the hall. Finding out when these facilities are being used by other classes would be done by contacting the college and then you would work from there to designate times for the classes. On sunnier days the classes can be carried out on the green area outside the t&l building. Locating trained health professionals can be an issue but I think both students and staff can play a part in facilitating these classes. Exercise and health courses and other sports orientated courses can facilitate these classes which would benefit both the participant and the facilitator ad they are getting the experience in. I think the students union would be interested in creating this for the college as it is a fun way to get everyone physically active and socially connected and it builds a sense of community. Surveying staff and students on the type of physical activity they would like to participate would give a good indication in building a plan towards implementing this facility. Putting availability as an option on the surveys would give a good indication of when people would be available and you could compare that with the facilities that are available during those times, you would look at the most common time people are available and go from there. Simple physical activity classes can be carried out with little or no gym equipment, the college has plenty of small gym equipment that can be used.
I think this would be a brilliant idea to create more physical activity programs in the college to promote the health and wellbeing of students and staff, it is another option rather then moving the gym facility to the cork road campus as there would be too many issues in doing this. I think that I as a student would really enjoy these facilities and it would be a great idea to get the college more socially connected.