Sport England System Partner
In 2022, Sport for Confidence became a Sport England System Partner, which represents a strategic alignment with the overarching goals and initiatives outlined in Sport England's ambitious 10-year strategy, "Uniting the Movement."
The system partnership demonstrates Sport England’s support for the value of occupational therapy within the sport and leisure industry. Occupational therapists are experts in the link between health and occupation (meaningful activity, the things that occupy us), and are well placed to provide inclusive support for those furthest away from sport and leisure opportunities, reducing health inequalities by removing barriers to participation.
Sport for Confidence are proud to be part of the disability partners within Sport England. The disability partners are focused on empowering people with disabilities to access opportunities to be active, as data shows that disabled people are much more likely to be inactive than people without disabilities (Sport England 2024 ) . Our work as a disability partner is important in ensuring occupational justice* in communities; however, our role encompasses work across several areas of Sport England’s partnerships, including health, disability and workforce, demonstrating the holistic and broad reach of occupational therapy as a profession.
Our model aims to reduce health inequalities, promote participation in physical activity and support people to access their local community through placing occupational therapists and sports coaches into leisure centres, providing opportunities to engage in meaningful physical activity.
The Sport England system partnership enables Sport for Confidence to ‘learn locally and share nationally’, influencing the health, sport, leisure and community sectors in innovative ways of working using physical activity as a preventative and public health tool to improve health, wellbeing and occupational justice*.
* Occupational justice: ‘recognises occupational rights to inclusive participation in everyday occupations for all persons in society, regardless of age, ability, gender, social class, or other differences.’ - Nilsson & Townsend, 2010. In other words, every person should be able to engage in their meaningful daily activities, regardless of who they are.
Moving OT's
The Moving OTs Community of Practice is an inclusive space where occupational therapy practitioners and occupational therapy students from around the world can come together. This is a space to share ideas, knowledge and skills around promoting physical activity as part of occupational therapy practice, therefore improving health and wellbeing, and empowering individuals, groups and communities towards health equity and occupational justice.
We believe that Occupational Therapists are perfectly placed to be at the forefront of public health practice, and if you agree – we’d love for you to join us! The community of practice is open to all Occupational Therapists, OT support workers, and OT students, and takes place every two months on Wednesday evenings, on the third Wednesday of the month.
Please click the button below to sign up for our Moving OTs Community of Practice email list, and be the first to receive all the details of our upcoming events.
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