Age & Opportunity Fitline - An evaluation of Age & Opportunity's Fitline telephone support service

Descriptions

Age & Opportunity has been awarded funding with the support of Sport Ireland and Healthy Ireland Keep Well Campaign to significantly expand our existing FitLine initiative; a free telephone support service, delivered by volunteer mentors, who encourage older people to start being physically active and maintain physical activity as part of their daily lives. The service will be expanded nationally, to include FitLine "hubs" across the country, delivered by 120 volunteer mentors, making contact with up to 1,000 participants twice a month. The mentors will undergo induction training in the skills of motivational interviewing and behavioural change techniques as well the benefits of physical activity, enabling them to encourage and motivate participants to be more physically active and involved in their local communities and clubs. The mentors will also engage in leadership training and mentors and participants will be offered a place on Age & Opportunity’s Changing Gears course, a resilience boosting initiative. The role of the external evaluator is foreseen as follows:•Identify elements of best practice and quality indicators in the project delivery;•Measure the overall outputs achieved against the project work-plan;•Measure the short and medium term impacts achieved against the project objectives;•Contribute to the project’s reporting requirements and produce a final evaluation report;•Make recommendations on how FitLine could be improved.