European Institute for Socio-Economic Development

SWEATY HEARTS

SWEATY HEARTS project promotes voluntary activities in sport, together with social inclusion and awareness of the importance of health-enhancing physical activity through increased participation in, and equal access to, sport for all in particular for cardiac patients.

Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) is the single most common cause of death in Europe: accounting for 1.7 million deaths in Europe each year. However, the huge development and resulting investment in high-technology diagnostic and therapeutic procedures in recent decades ensures increased survival. As a consequence, a greater number of men and women now survive acute events but inherit heavier burden of chronic conditions and clinical need, this constituting a larger pool of patients eligible to benefit from cardiac rehabilitation (CR). CR can be divided in four different phases. The last phase, the maintenance of an healthy lifestyle, is considered as a life-long responsibility of every patient but CR programs are frequently unavailable and underutilized resources. So, effective and practical interventions to encourage individuals to remain active in phase IV are needed: the intervention that could be incorporated into existing cardiac rehabilitation services should be the involvement, in a multidisciplinary staff, of HCPs and personnel able to prescribe physical activity, with communication skills and expertise in behaviour changes.

Considering this situation, the project objectives are:

  • to design programs where patients, organized in groups, follow active sessions of physical activity and educational sessions about healthy lifestyles.;
  • to organise training of personnel involved in the integrated approach sessions (physicians, psychologists, nurses, physiotherapists, trainers, etc.) and make them able to prescribe physical activity, with communication skills and expertise in behaviour changes; to organise dedicated events to disseminate the project.

 

The project is implemented in Italy, Austria, Belgium, Greece and Hungary.