Linking Health and Recreation

By GILLIAN PENROSE
Quick, what has a telephone book to do with health and recreation?

The phone book provides a startling snapshot of the relationship between health and recreation. Over seven "blue" government pages are devoted to our Health Service while finding a Recreation department is difficult. Most instructive, and reflective of our imbalanced priorities.

Governmental cutbacks in the sport/recreation/fitness since the 90’s have demoted Recreation from full fledged Director/Ministerial departments to the 11th item under a category like Community Development.

Isn't this all backwards? Surely, emphasizing active recreation, sport and fitness pursuits would reduce the need for and costs of health care.

Facing rising health costs, New Zealand has moved their focus and significant funding from Health services to recreation, integrated Sport/Recreation, Nutrition and Health to work as a unit, set outcome targets and is already benefitting from a drop in the demand for health services and costs.

Up front investment, focusing on constructing comprehensive recreation facilities, programming, specialized workers and funding will cost less than projected long term Health and social services costs.

Our priorities must be aggressively reversed and refocused by expanding our sport and recreation capabilities. Mainland Common is the obvious starting place.