Published Monday 13 July 2020 at 13:50
As part of the Council’s Worker Bee campaign, staff working across different departments are sharing their stories on adapting their roles during the Coronavirus outbreak.
Amy Greenhalgh is the Council’s physical activity and health improvement manager.
She has seen her job change from running the borough’s gyms and face-to-face advice sessions to virtual advice and workouts.
“Giving people a bit of normality when things have been anything but normal has been challenging but we’ve risen to it,” says Amy.
Along with Amy’s team of fitness and wellbeing instructors, it’s their responsibility to help keep the residents of Blackburn and Darwen active, healthy and engaged in a healthy lifestyle.
Amy said:
We’ve had to totally change how we work and we’ve adapted so we deliver as much as we can digitally – but we really miss the face-to-face contact we have with our clients.
We have quite a lot of older clients and many of them are isolated or shielding due to different health conditions. We’re calling people once a week to check in and they’ve told us that contact has been really positive for them and a distraction from all the negative things going on in the world. It’s helped them to keep motivated with their exercises and has impacted their mental as well as their physical wellbeing.
We’ve completely revamped our website – so it’s packed full of exercise videos, ideas and resources to help people – especially those that might have never done anything before.
What we’re doing isn’t heroic, but we are trying to help people keep some sense of normality and it means a lot to us when we hear what a positive effect it’s had on people.