Under the title “Sport as a therapeutic tool”, selected for the Nursing in Development Awards 2022 among 175 candidatures
Since 2016, the Athletic Club Foundation has been collaborating with Osakidetza’s Bizkaia Mental Health Network (RSMB) by organising weekly multisport and football sessions. It is a project led by the nurse Aurora Oña García, a specialist in Mental Health, who coordinates together with the Fundazioa team the inclusion of sport as part of the medical, transversal and multidisciplinary care that Osakidetza dedicates to people with mental illnesses.
The ED Awards reward nursing initiatives with the aim of highlighting the importance of their role in patient care. Nominations are submitted anonymously, without mentioning the names of the participating organisations. The 14 finalists in the 7 categories (two finalists per category) have recently been announced, and the RSMB Project has been chosen from among the 175 applications submitted by nurses and physiotherapists, both in healthcare and teaching, research and management, students, nursing units, professional and patient associations from all over Spain.
The decision will be announced on 25 November, but being a finalist is already a recognition of this collaborative project.
The jury valued the therapeutic benefits that the project offers thanks to the futsal and multisport training sessions led by the Foundation’s technicians in 17 RSMB centres. Specifically, these benefits are the promotion of health, the achievement of individual objectives set in a multidisciplinary team, the fight against loneliness through the promotion of interpersonal relationships and social inclusion with the use of community resources.
Furthermore, the Foundation adds a benefit that is even more relevant than sport itself, and that is the capacity Athletic Club has as a motor for inclusion and normalisation. In this sense, Athletic makes the illness visible, combats misinformation, eliminates social stigma, provides a group identity and works as a medicine against apathy, the loss of illusion that people with mental illness have, and gives them a boost of motivation to achieve certain things that otherwise they would not have been able to achieve.
