Rob Copeland, believing, belonging, behaving, and becoming at the AWRC

Professor Rob Copeland is Director of The Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre (AWRC) in Sheffield and Professor of Physical Activity and Health at Sheffield Hallam University.

Rob is a keen cyclist. He says “if it’s going to be a good day, it’ll start with a bike ride…”

He arrived at the studio having just played host to Andy Anson, the new CEO of the British Olympic Association. That meeting focused on the work that Rob and colleagues across the city have been doing on the Olympic legacy, supporting the population to be more physically active.

Rob graduated in Sport and Exercise Science from Newcastle University. He studied for a Masters at the University of Sheffield before working for two years as a Community Health and Fitness Officer in Mansfield, supporting people with chronic health conditions into physical activity. That laid the groundwork for an academic career that started at Sheffield Hallam University, where Rob took a PhD in ‘Psychology and Childhood Obesity.’

Over the past 18 years Rob has worked on over 100 projects supporting people into a healthier lifestyle.

The story of the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre conventionally starts with the 2012 Olympic Games, but before then Professor Steve Hake had a project called ‘Sports Pulse’, which was about how academia and elite sport, particularly sports engineering, could support local companies to advance their technologies.

With London 2012, Sheffield was awarded foundation partner status in the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine and received £10m of investment from the then Department of Health. Sheffield established a city-wide partnership with representation from every aspect of civic life, led by Sir Andrew Cash and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. The money was used to collocate NHS clinics with leisure centres. Three leisure centres in Sheffield now host 80,000 clinical appointments per year.

This in turn became part of a much bigger programme called ‘Move More’, Sheffield’s physical activity strategy. The ambition of that programme was to transform Sheffield into the most active city in the UK. Rob led that programme and Steve Hake became the Research Director.

That programme morphed into the AWRC. At its heart is the vision of transforming lives through innovations that help people move.

The AWRC is located in Darnall, a ward of 22,000 people, a neighbourhood of 90,000 people, where there is “huge health inequality”, so the centre has a contextual local vision, “it’s not just a grand vision.”

The £14m funding for the building came from an application to the Department of Health and Social Care. The European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) provided just under £1m for the equipment.

The research work of the AWRC is coordinated around three themes: Healthy and Active 100, which looks at how someone born in Darnall today could expect to live 100 years of healthy and active life; Living Well with Chronic Disease, which considers physical activity as a treatment for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke etc; Technological and Digital Innovations to promote independent lives, which talks to the NHS 10-year plan.

The centre has a programme of engagement with the private sector, including new start-ups and SMEs. Deputy Director Dr Chris Lowe secured a grant of £850k from Research England to create a ‘Wellbeing Accelerator’, which supports the private sector with academic expertise.

To be remotely successful the AWRC will have to have tackle the 38% of the population who, according to the latest NHS report, average less than 15 minutes per day of vigorous activity. In relation to this, Rob is “wholly convinced by the power of people.” All communities have assets, talents, and drive, and the AWRC is concerned with creating the conditions within which they can thrive. But the social, economic, and environmental conditions are not the same across all communities. Therefore, this has to be a conversation about empowerment and not blame.

If Rob could take over from Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care for a year, his priorities would be a) supporting the workforce in their own health and wellbeing, b) prevention, albeit Rob can’t point to a meaningful programme around prevention right now, c) improved coordination of services for older adults, and d) the use of exercise to improve fitness prior to treatment.

Rob hasn’t had a long-term career plan. He has gone where he has felt called to go, or to places that interest him. He has a real heart for Sheffield and he has chosen to stay there. His personal ambition is to support communities into better health and wellbeing.

Rob claims not to have thought explicitly about his leadership philosophy, but says he sees his role as creating the culture in which members of his team can “thrive, excel and surprise themselves in terms of what can be achieved.” Part of this involves setting the direction in terms of the why and what, and also articulating how the journey should feel. He would summarise his approach as “believing, belonging, behaving and becoming.”

He is wary of overplaying his strengths and says he has to compensate for his natural bias towards caring for his team, by working hard at setting the direction of the organisation. His lesson from his mistakes is that “we won’t get things right… but it’s what we do with those things that’s important.”

Rob says he has had “incredible support” during his career from both within the university and outside of it and mentions David Whitney, Sir Andrew Cash, John Mothersole, Professor Sue Mawson, Dr Ollie Hart, his wife and family, Sir David Brailsford, and Lizzie Armitstead.

Apart from cycling, Rob’s self-care regime includes close family relationships, taking time out to reflect, and his faith – he is a member of St Thomas Philadelphia. His book recommendation is The Rabbit and The Elephant by Tony Dale, Felicity Dale and George Barna, which is story about church planting that focuses on how you can create agile communities.

His advice to his 20-year old self is “find something you enjoy, treat people with dignity and respect, and ride bikes.”

Finally, Rob describes the ultimate goal of the city region’s London 2012 Legacy activities: an active population is an economically vibrant population; an economically vibrant population will help to close the health inequality gap; sport can harness hearts and minds in communities, and drive up aspiration (in the right conditions, with the power given over to the right people); for Sheffield to become one of the healthiest and wealthiest cities on the planet.