MSc Physiotherapy students create university webpage to promote the benefits of walking to the GCU community

MSc Physiotherapy students are getting their steps in to show the benefits that walking can have on your physical and mental health.

As part of a year-long module, students on the MSc Physiotherapy programme have been tasked to work with a community initiative to help engage and introduce healthier lifestyles to the public.

Students Lauren Woodruff, Millie Keddie, Amy Cox, Brian Docherty and Declan Pajewski decided to focus their project on a series of walks hosted by the Student Wellbeing and Library team, who have organised weekly walks for both students and staff.

The group realised that the walks were mainly attended by staff and wanted to find a way to promote it to students by developing a dedicated webpage. The webpage, which will help advertise the walks, will also include an online form which will help students learn about their exercise levels. As well as this, the group has created videos to show how to warm up for a walk and exercises that can be done while sitting at a desk.

“We had thought about the walking idea for a while, and we initially thought that we had saw some organised walks around campus. We approached the Library about it, who suggested that we got in touch with Christina from Wellbeing about finding more about them.” Lauren explained.

“The walks that were currently happening usually involved staff and students didn’t engage with it as much, so we saw a gap that students weren’t hearing about it somehow. It was a great opportunity for us to get more students involved.”

Millie added: “It’s a year-long module which involves being put into groups and coming up with a community-based project around a technical or to help reduce sedentary activity. It worked out well that we decided to work on a university-related project!”

In order to promote it to students, the group had to look at current health research and guidelines that have already been set out by the Scottish government. Through their research, it was noted that young people aged 18-35 weren’t meeting the required amount of exercise per week.

“It involved a lot of research around the information that is already out there about the topic of sedentary activity and the benefits of movement. There’s already guidelines and advice which are government led.” Brian explained.

“We wanted to find out what information was most relevant to our specific project. Since ours focuses on walking groups, we referred to Scotland’s national plans and the World Health Organisation (WHO) to see what was already established and how we could link it to our project.

We also wanted to look at the different benefits, like what movement can actually do. For example, how it can help improve both your physical and mental health. The idea was to pull different examples of benefits from different areas and building a case of showing how important movement, such as walking, can be.”

As well as looking at statistics, the students were able to use the information to create helpful videos to help people become less sedentary – even if they aren’t able to get outside for a walk. Lauren said: “We also created some videos for the website, like examples of warm-ups that you can do before a walk or even in general if you don’t have the time for one. We also created some seated-desk exercises. As a student or anyone working, it can be easy to sit for a few hours without moving. It’s just about making it easier to achieve your exercise goals one bit at a time.”

Millie enjoyed the challenge of creating a website and interacting with patients in a unique way. She said: “It’s also good for us because, as physiotherapy students, we are taught to be able to prescribe programmes to people, but projects like these show us how to actually talk to the public about promoting healthier habits.

It’s been a different kind of project for sure, none of us have made a website before so it’s been a real learning curve!”

By Rachael McAlonan

Got a SCEBE or GSBS story? Email me at Rachael.McAlonan@gcu.ac.uk or connect with me on social media