Sporting Wellness is delighted to announce its first official stakeholder, Oxford Brookes University!
In doing so, Oxford Brookes now becomes the first university in the UK to offer free, professional and confidential mental healthcare to all of their BUCS (British Universities & Colleges Sport) registered and representative student-sportspeople. This truly marks a huge step towards mental health being treated just as seriously as physical health, within university sport.
Throughout this academic year, representative and BUCS registered sportspeople at Oxford Brookes University will now be entitled to usage of the Sporting Wellness’s mental health and emotional well-being support system, regardless of whether any emotional difficulties are sport induced or not.
These services provided by Sporting Wellness, in association with Health Assured, will include:
As well as the support services, Sporting Wellness will also be delivering multiple educational sessions to Oxford Brookes sportspeople. The aim of these will be to encourage individuals to take proactive steps towards positive emotional wellness and to view mental health as not merely the absence of illness but as an overall state of being that can be performance enhancing within any sport.
Founder and CEO of Sporting Wellness, Callum Lea said: “When we started the charity back in 2019, the primary goal was to increase the amount of sportspeople who had access to private healthcare. In opening up our support system to the entirety of Oxford Brookes’s BUCS sportspeople, we’re certainly doing that and its been incredibly encouraging to see how Oxford Brookes are treating the mental health of their student sportspeople just as seriously as their physical health”.
Marcus Boswell, Student Sport Manager, said:
“We hope that our student-sportspeople will reap the benefits of Sporting Wellness’ multifaceted approach to support, complementing the existing support structures within our university more widely whilst honing in on that sense of identity and belonging that student-sportspeople feel.
“I would like to thank Callum for his unwavering support in making this relationship possible. Knowing Callum’s journey prior to him joining Oxford Brookes, creating Sporting Wellness during his time here, and now he is helping to establish an unrivalled level of support for those student-sportspeople succeeding him, we are nothing short of proud of his work to date.”
Everyone at Sporting Wellness is incredibly excited to develop this relationship with Oxford Brookes and do everything we can to assist them in promoting emotional wellness and positive mental health amongst their student sportspeople.