Wednesday 14 February 2018

Post-Event Massage Service at The London Marathon

This is the text of the document I wrote proposing a post-event massage service. I've continued to work on it and this text includes a section about costs that arises from a number of conversations I've had with others.

The Idea in Short


The London Virgin Marathon attracts thousands of runners every year. Many run to raise funds for charities. After 26 miles of running it’s great to be able to offer these fund-raising runners the opportunity to have a short sports massage to help ease tired limbs and reduce some or the inevitable post-event soreness that they will experience.
But what do you do if you are either a smaller charity, without the resources, or a charity with only a handful of runners? Our idea is simple: Gather a small team of therapists working with a group of charities to provide a post-event service to their runners.
Rather than work individually we pool our resources and work as a team. Four or five therapist serving up to a hundred runners across maybe six or seven charities. The charities benefit too. Not only can they offer a post-event treatment to their runners, they can work together on meeting their runners after the event and sharing the costs of post-event gifts and refreshments.
If you think this is interesting then read the proposal in full and let’s turn this idea into a reality.
Richard
Introduction

Having supported Against Breast Cancer as a Sports Massage Therapist for the last two years at the London Marathon, and having worked at the event for the last six years, I began to think about other smaller charities and their runners. 
Larger charities, or charities with large numbers of runners, often have access to a large team of therapists who serve their runners. For example, one charity for whom I’ve worked has over 150 runners in the event. We had a team of 8 or 10 therapists and between us we treated around 120 runners. (Not all runners come for treatment.)
So I began to think about smaller charities who may not have the opportunity to provide a service to their runners and this idea was born. This proposal sets out the principles and basic concept of what might be possible.
Given that not all runners come for treatment I would suggest that a single therapist working for a single charity might expect to treat between 50-75% of the participants. That might mean that it is simply not feasible for your charity to seek the services of a therapist.
What if a single therapist is working for a charity and they have 20 runners in the event. Of those 20 runners, only 12 come for treatment. That probably gives the therapist a reasonable number of clients for the day, but it also leaves room for anything up to 8 more possible treatments. From experience, dependant upon how well grouped the runners are as they arrive, it’s possible to treat as many as 25 runners over a four hour period based on a simple 10 minute post-event massage. 
So why not join forces? If 4 or 5 charities with fewer that 25 runners got together we might be able to provide a post-event treatment for more runners.
How it might work
Let’s assume that each therapist could comfortably manage to treat 15 runners over a 4 hour cycle. A typical post-event massage lasts around 10-15 minutes, and there’s a bit of time cleaning the couch etc before the next treatment. Obviously there is likely to be some degree of congestion as a number of runners arrive at the same time. It is also important to factor in breaks for the therapists. Massage can be hard work, and although we’re all trained to look after our hands, it is quite stressful.
So, a team of 4 therapists might reasonably be expected to be able to treat 60 runners. If between 50-70% come for treatment, that would suggest that we could cater for up to 120 registered runners.
If we limited access to the scheme to organisations with 25 or fewer participants, then 5 charities could participate or a greater number if they have fewer registered runners. 
What the charities would need to do
The charities would need to liaise with each other and a designated team leader for the therapists. It would be easiest for there to be one point of contact between the charities group and the therapists on both sides.
Between them, the charities would provide a suitable marquee to house the therapists, provide any refreshments they wished to provide and offer any expenses they wish. Each charity would probably want to provide their own “goody bags” to their runners, but I’d suggest some sort of partnership arrangement so that each runner gets something similar. Each charity would also display its own branding etc around the marquee.
Each charity would organise its own ‘meet & greet’ for its runners, although again this might be something that could be done cooperatively. 
The whole idea is to share the load and provide a service to a greater number of runners.
What the Therapist Group would do
Each therapist would be responsible for bringing their own equipment, food, snacks, water etc to the venue. They would be expected to commit to the day, starting and finishing together.
Each therapists would provide proof of insurance, First Aid Qualification and Sports Massage Qualification. Any student therapists would be required to provide the same details and a minimum level of training would be expected (On the course I did that would be passing the general massage assessment).
The group coordinator would gather all the relevant documentation and provide copies to the charities coordinator. They would also supervise the team on the day and organise any pre-event meetings/training that they felt would be helpful.
The group coordinator would supply consent forms and other administration with respect to treatment.
Other things to think about 
Administration on the day: It is good practise that each runner completes a simple consent form before treatment. If the therapists are busy there may be a need for someone from one of the charities to take responsibility for ensuring that forms are completed and any relevant information passed to the therapist.
This is not an exhaustive analysis, it’s just the germ of an idea that has been taking root over a few years. There are probably a whole host of things that need to be considered in order to make it work. On the other hand I believe that every person who commits themselves to running 26.2 mile to raise money for the benefit of other deserves the opportunity of a little post-event therapy.
Getting a team of therapists together might actually be one of the greater challenges, but we shall have to see! 
A Final Word
Each year I’ve worked at the London Marathon it’s been a challenge getting across the city dragging my couch and equipment. I do it because I believe it’s worth the effort to support all the people who have trained hard and campaigned to raise funds for their chosen charity. Each year I meet first-time, (and last-time!) runners. I hear stories about why they’ve chosen to run.
I’d love to see every charity runner have the option of a post-event massage. They all deserve it. 

Counting the Cost
Since putting this proposal together and sharing it with a number of people it has become clear that we need to put some figures on the cost of providing this service. So here goes!
The first thing to note is that this is not a free service. There will be costs, and rightly so. Therapists are trained professionals and we ought not to assume that they all will give their time for free. There are also costs involved in travelling, transport, admin and supervision. So it seems right to begin to put some numbers on these things.
I’m slowly getting a handle on how it works in other situations, and there’s still a lot to learn, but at a basic level there would be a fee to be part of the service. My suggestion is that each charity pays the same to be part of the service, and at the moment I’m thinking this would be around £50-£100. It’s a bit of a guess, and I’m certainly not trying to make money out of this, but I don’t think that it’s an unreasonable amount. Trying to develop a sliding scale dependent upon how many registered runners each charity has just makes the process a whole lot harder and I’m all for simple solutions. My understanding is that a typical cost to a single charity of £200-£300, dependant upon the size of the team, is typical and means that supervisors are appropriately paid for their work and responsibilities. 
Should the therapists get paid? This is a tricky one. Students can’t be paid (although offering expenses is appropriate), but qualified therapists might expect to be paid. I have always volunteered my time freely, but that’s my choice. A typical fee for a paid event would be around £75 for a four hour day. 
My preference would be that all therapists volunteer their time, but we have to accept that some will choose not to do this. I would certainly set this up as a volunteer service initially, but in the longer term we might have to consider paying therapist in order to avoid people pulling out at the last minute because a paid offer came along. 
There are also admin costs to consider. Managing a team of therapists will require time and effort. I’m not sure how you’d quantify this, but it would need to be taken into consideration. First Aid supplies, water, snacks, all might become part of the overall package.
So, let’s start by assuming that supervisors get paid for their day, and let’s say that they get £250. Let’s also say that there’s a deputy supervisor and they get £150 (future proofing by planning for someone to take over). £400 split between say 5 charities is £80 a charity. That doesn’t sound unreasonable to me, in fact it sounds like very good value!
Let’s take it one step further and assume we now pay our qualified therapists (remember we might have both qualified and student therapists). If we had a team of 4, and 2 were qualified. At £75 a day, that’s £150.
I’ve already suggested that 4 therapists could treat up to 120 registered runners if 50-70% come for treatment. If that’s 5 charities, then the cost per charity to pay the therapists is £30. 
That makes the cost in total per charity around £110.
There's still a lot of work needed to make this happen, but it's far better to get something out there and refine as we go than to try and set up the perfect system with every angle covered. It is, in R&D terms, an iterative process!

If the numbers rise then clearly so do the costs. But then the numbers rise with rises charity involvement, so there’s no reason to assume that the costs to any charity will every rise above the £80-£110 amount except for inflation increases.
There's still a lot of work needed to make this happen, but it's far better to get something out there and refine as we go than to try and set up the perfect system with every angle covered. It is, in R&D terms, an iterative process!

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