News and Blog

As leisure centres and sport clubs begin to re-open across the UK, ORH takes a look at the impact that Covid-19 has had on sport participation.

Sport participation data from Sport England’s Active Lives survey is crucial for calculating the demand from the population for Sport England and sportscotland’s Facility Planning Model (FPM), which ORH operates and maintains. However, for a third of this year, there’s been no participation in activities involving indoor facilities such as, swimming, badminton and squash, and no team sports (at amateur level). So, what have we been doing instead, and will we maintain this behaviour?

On 23 March 2020 the British public were instructed to ‘stay at home’ but allowed one form of outdoor exercise each day such as running, walking or cycling. This caused massive disruption to physical activity. Sport England began monitoring the change in activity levels with weekly surveys through April and May, and monthly surveys in June and July.

In Sport England’s first survey, for the week 3-6  April, walking proved to be the most popular activity undertaken for 59% of adults. With gyms and clubs closed, 44% of adults took part in fitness classes and activities online and offline, or just exercised informally in their homes instead. Activities such as running were undertaken by 18% of adults, and 8% cycled.

After guidance on the number of outdoor exercise periods was lifted on 13 May, we reached peak activity levels in the week 15-18  May. The proportion of adults cycling doubled from the first week to 16%, almost two-thirds of adults (65%) were walking, and one-fifth of adults were running.

In July, with restrictions easing and more activities like golf and tennis becoming available, the proportion of people walking had reduced to 58%, similar to the pre-lockdown level.  The proportion of people doing home-based activities, which had peaked at the beginning of May at 48%, fell to 34%. However, cycling and running have managed to maintain some improvement since the start of lockdown, with 14% of adults cycling and 20% of adults running in July.

So, will athletes return to their previous patterns of sport participation or continue with the alternative activities discovered in lockdown? There definitely seems to be an intention to return to the same activities as pre-lockdown, but also to do more walking, running, home-based fitness and water sports. We’ll just have to wait for the next batch of data in 2021 to find out if people actually do this.

International Control Room Week is a week to specifically celebrate the unsung heroes of the emergency services, run by Hull technology firm APD Communications.

This is being held for the second time from October 21 to 27, and is supported by fire, ambulance, police, coastguard and airport staff across the country. The campaign week highlights the critical role played by the control room teams that keep people safe and deal with traumatic incidents daily.

Emergency service control rooms are often the heart of the service, providing an essential function that can go unrecognised. An effective control room needs the optimal staff mix and to manage resources dynamically using innovative technology. ORH supports emergency services around the world to operate more efficiently.

http://www.internationalcontrolroomweek.com/

The ACT Government in Australia has announced plans to deliver additional emergency service vehicles and stations based on the advice of ORH’s review of the Station Upgrade and Relocation Plan (SURP). ORH used projected changes to both population and road journey times to create 2028 demand scenarios for both the ambulance and fire services in Canberra. Our simulation and optimisation models were used to predict changes to operations and identify the number of vehicles and locations required by each service to maintain and improve emergency response standards in the future.

As a result, the ACT Government will now begin work on two new combined ambulance and fire stations, to be located in the City and Molonglo Valley. They will also recruit more firefighters and invest in a new aerial platform vehicle to improve their response capabilities to the growth in higher density and multi-storey buildings. Further details from the ACT Government can be found here.

Wales Audit Office has published a report on the maturity of local government in use of data. This report investigates the technology available to public sector organisations, the rate of technological change and the importance of data-driven decision making. The objective is to explore the extent to which local authorities in Wales are making use of these processes.

We are very pleased to see that ORH’s Dynamic Cover Tool (the DCT) is cited as an example of best practice by fire services, with particular reference to its application in London Fire Brigade (see page 47 of the report). The DCT helps to improve incident and risk coverage and ensures that resources are used as efficiently as possible. More details are available here.

Find out how ORH’s patient transport simulation modelling helped HealthShare NSW, Australia, in the latest edition of The OR Society’s Impact magazine. Software engineer Tom Boness and consultant Hannah Mayes from ORH discuss how a collaborative approach with HealthShare NSW enabled them to maximise efficiency across the state as they transitioned to a new model of patient transport. You can read the full article in the Spring 2018 edition, as featured on the publisher’s website.