Assignment 2 - Article 2

Preston’s swimming success

If swimming’s your thing then Preston’s your place, as the activity now thrives in the region.


‘Get people off the streets’

The city council recently received a £211,000 government grant to allow children and pensioners to swim for free.

The scheme will begin in April 2009 in a bid to improve health and fitness in the area.

Since receiving this grant the council are working closely with Preston Swimming Club, one of the largest swimming clubs in the country with over 750 members, to help get more people into our pools.

Phil Walsh, Preston City Council’s head of Leisure, Sports and Arts said: “Essentially this money is for widening participation in swimming.

“There are high numbers of children not swimming by age 11 and ethnic minorities who can’t swim. Sports development really does get people off the streets and away from crime.”


Olympic hopes

Members of Preston Swimming Club are advocates for this, with young members looking towards competing in the 2012 London Olympics.

The swimming talent for London 2012 has been recognised by the Lancashire Sports Partnership, and talks are ensuing on building a 50 metre pool in Preston, as currently our local Olympic hopefuls have to travel to Manchester to do their training.

Lord Sebastian Coe, ex-Olympian and head of the London 2012 committee, has publicly backed the pool bid.

Peter Mason, chairman of Preston Swimming club, said: “Our biggest problem is that capacity for swimming is low, we only have Fulwood and West View pools that are 25 metres, we would benefit greatly from at 50 metre one. We have about half a dozen Olympic hopefuls in the club.”


Passionate locals

These developments follow this year’s protests by Fylde locals trying to save Kirkham Baths from proposed closure, illustrating how important swimming is to people in the area.

So whether it’s Olympic success you’re after, getting fit or keeping busy, it seems Preston is the place to swim. Below is a map of swimming pools in the area.



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Assignment 2 - Article 1

Preston cheapest place to exercise in Lancashire

Leisure centres in Preston have some of the cheapest deals in the county.

Fulwood and West View leisure centres, funded by the council, offer a number of low-cost membership deals in an attempt to make Preston a healthy population.


Student membership

Their newest offer aims to get students active; with a membership fee of £15 a year much better value than the £80 a year University of Central Lancashire gym membership.

For this fee, valid student ID holders get free access to swimming, climbing walls and fitness rooms between 7.30am and 4.30pm Monday to Friday. For more information click here.

The membership had 200 applicants in the first month.

Shirley Brookes, Customer Services Manager at Fulwood Leisure Centre said: “It’s been a really good response considering it’s not been greatly advertised; I’m really pleased with it.

“I’d be surprised if anywhere else in Lancashire offers student membership better than £15, it’s a unique deal.”


Passport to Leisure membership

Another membership the leisure centres offer is the Passport to Leisure Card.

A benchmark study last year showed that the Passport to Leisure membership was the cheapest in the North West.

The card is available to people on low or no income, people with a disability, people over 60, fostered children and, most recently, for people from registered charities.

The cost of the membership is £3 per year, with the charge of a £1 per activity for the adults on a low or no income category.

Shirley said: “Passport to Leisure was put in place because we want the people of Preston to become healthy, and that’s our main aim; for Preston to have the most active population in the North West by 2010.”

“It’s extremely important for everyone to be able to afford leisure services, Preston has one of the top percentage of people who are unhealthy and who have got health related illnesses. And if we can help reduce that, it can only be a good thing for the economy and for the people of Preston.”

A little off subject...

Ok so I know this is supposed to be a blog on health, and this isn't a health story but I also need to try out some digital journalism tools.
So a great Northern supermarket is celebrating more than 160 years of being the 'fabric of Lancashire' by releasing a book, 'The Story of Booths'.
Here are the Booths branches in Lancashire:


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Playing with Google Maps

This is my first attempt at making a map on Google, this shows the walking route between the Uni's main building, Foster, and the Journalism main building, Greenbank.


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What does Preston need?

A story surfaced the other day about plans to build an extension of a Lancashire mental hospital on a site where a discgraced mental hospital once stood. Whittingham mental hospital, at Guild Park, was closed in the early 90's after accusations of cruelty, mistreatment and fraud. This has led to an public enquiry, the results of which are expected by the end of this month.
So as this vast site at Guild Park is now unused, there are many ideas for what to build there, one of which being 65o new houses proposed by constuction company Taylor Wimpey.
So what would Preston actually benefit most from? A mental health hospital or more houses? I asked some locals to try and find out.

The Pink Patch

So this story was in the news a few months ago, but the issue is still apparent. So called 'miracle' pills or patches which claim to aid you in losing weight. This particular product, The Pink Patch, was advertised on websites, including the social networking site, Facebook. This is what people were particularly up in arms about; that young women were being put under further pressure to reach an unattainable image. Looking at one of the Facebook groups about The Pink Patch shows some of the issues it raises.
Now I don't know about you, but I'm actually a bit sick of hearing the whole 'the media makes young girls have eating disorders' malarkey, because I didn't consider much comparing myself to celebrities until they kept banging on about it. So I can imagine the whole fuss that has been made about it may have created more of a problem that existed in the first place. But however it began, I have found that, unfortunately, some people are obsessed with losing weight in whatever way is possible. Just a look on the (rather dull) drugs and medications section of the Yahoo health message boards, shows that there isn't a more popular topic that 'slimming pills'. (Although Viagra comes a close second but that's another topic altogether).
So why do people do it? Why is it so important to some to be skinny? And why are people going to the extremes of tampering with their natural self to feel like they fit in in society?

Cot death confusion

So another day and another cryptic health story in the press.

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2008/10October/Pages/Cotdeathriskandfanuse.aspx

So the news is that having a fan on when a baby sleeps could dramatically cut the risk of cot death. Great, all well and good. But then you read/watched/listened on to discover that: there was a 94% reduction of cot death with a fan in rooms over 21°C, and little or no difference in deaths with a fan in rooms under 21°C. Eh??? So are they are saying if you keep the room cool to limit the risk of cot death? If so why have they made it so statistical? Why does the story have to be so complicated? People could interpret this story with all these statistics and arguments in different ways, therefore absorbing the wrong information.
For those of you who are parents of young children out there, I can imagine when first hearing this story it sounded like a simple way of hopefully keeping your children safe, but then you learn the full story and it has all these 'ifs', 'buts' and 'howevers', it would distress you even more to think you may be doing the wrong thing for your child than if you had just never heard this story at all.
So if a health study doesn't conclusively prove anything at all is it really news? It seems to me stories like this create this hypochondriac culture. If people took all the health stories in the news into account, which some protective mums do especially well, there would be so many contradictions that it would be impossible to know what to believe. For example, I have heard many contradictory stories about having one or two glasses of wine a day. And, lo-and-behold, if you type 'one glass of wine a day' into a search engine, you get a story like this, and a story like this, amongst others.
So are health stories really for our own good? Or to scare and bamboozle us?