European Healthy Stadia Programme

Following the success of the work around Healthy Stadia undertaken by Heart of Mersey in North West England, a successful proposal for a ‘Sports Stadia and Community Health’ project was made to the European Commission in the framework of its Public Health Programme (DG SANCO).

This project worked with an initial group of partner agencies in Finland, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Ireland, Poland, Spain and the UK, and was tasked with piloting the Healthy Stadia concept with stadia in a cross-section of European countries and developing suitable guidance documentation to further the future roll out healthy promotion activities.

One of the key activities for the European programme was benchmarking of current practices across Europe. Following an initial literature review, in March 2008 a questionnaire was disseminated by European project partners enquiring about the stadium’s age, ownership, capacity and range of ‘healthy’ initiatives. The results of this survey were published in Health Promotion International.

Building on this initial evidence base a Healthy Stadia ‘Toolkit’ was developed, providing users with a walk-through of how to adopt the Healthy Stadia concept, identify and address priority areas and work with local partners. This toolkit was supported by a host of case studies drawn together from stadia participating in the programme.

In order to disseminate much of the learning and results from this programme of work, our first European conference was held in Liverpool (UK) in September 2009, where the European Healthy Stadia Network was officially launched.

In addition to keynote speeches from UEFA, the European Commission and major sports stadia such as Anfield (Liverpool FC) and the Amsterdam Arena, the findings from the audit of current practice, the piloting of the toolkit and case studies generated through the European programme were disseminated to over 250 delegates.

For more information about the Healthy Stadia Conference: 2009 please click the button opposite to access the conference hub.