The Paediatric Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Team at the RUH are delighted to announce that they have launched ‘Mission: Move & Energy Explorers!’ a new, innovative fitness challenge for their patients that has been kindly sponsored by RUHX.
The challenge aims to incentivise the children to increase their daily exercise in a fun way. In recent years with the introduction of new Cystic Fibrosis modulator drugs there has been extensive research into the importance of exercise as an alternative to traditional physiotherapy for airway clearance. By getting the children fit and active the team hope that the patients will start to form healthy habits from a young age and recognise that being active really can help with their condition. In the long term, being more active will help ensure that the patients need less medications and hospital admissions, ultimately saving the Trust time and money too.
Dr Rebecca Winterson, Consultant Paediatrician from the Bath CF Team commented that “Studies have shown that just 20 minutes of continuous exercise each day at a level that gets a child with Cystic Fibrosis moderately breathless is associated with improved lung function and a reduction in the frequency of developing chest infections. Other really important benefits of exercise for the children include stronger muscles (including the heart and lungs), better sleep quality, increased energy levels and improved mental health. In the future we hope that other paediatric speciality’s may be able to set up similar fitness challenges too and together we can make a lasting impact on our young patient’s health and well-being”.
The goal of the new challenge is to get the children doing daily exercise and then logging the number of minutes completed using an on-line leaderboard app. For extra fun, each week the number of minutes of physical activity that everyone does (the staff are also joining in!) are combined and then converted into steps so that the group can ‘travel’ to virtual destinations together. The first destination is to travel from Bath, across the English Channel and on to the Eiffel Tower in Paris! Then the group will carry on the virtual trip across Europe and beyond.
As part of the challenge, each child will be given different items of exercise equipment on loan, such as digital skipping ropes, step counters, trampolines and balance boards to help encourage them to continue to be active and try out new activities.
The children’s fitness levels will be monitored during the trial using ‘sit to stand’ scores, lung capacity and the number of times they require antibiotics, to see how much their health and fitness levels improve.
