Obesity Prevention Programs - Case Study Example

and No Program Evaluation Paper #2 19 September Needs Assessment The health program about obesity prevention has to be evaluated properly before start. The needs assessment phase during the planning stage of program development will ensure a holistic approach to the entire undertaking. This simply means doing a needs assessment will help the program achieve its aims and will not be distracted by deviations along the way to its implementation. Additionally, it will also ensure a range of possible solution strategies can be adopted during the program by evaluating various alternatives (Willis, 1994, p. 89). Doing the needs assessment aspect will help to evaluate the program along its various stages of implementation and help improve its outcome in substantial ways. It will also help to correct any errors that might be observed and allow for corrective actions to be taken. The whole purpose of performing a needs assessment at the beginning of a program is to develop a list of priorities and estimate the deficiencies such as unmet needs for services or information; it can help greatly as a tool for decision making later (Royse, Thyer & Padgett, 2009,p. 55). For social programs or any public health programs, needs assessment will aid in the effort to have an idea of the extent of the problem to be solved, the resources necessary for its successful implementation, resource planning and allocation for scarce resources and doing an evaluation of the performance standards at strategic intervals. In the case of anti-obesity for children, it is imperative to precisely identify the causative factors such as television time, the reductions in physical activities, increased consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and the need to use effective counseling techniques and strategies built around a common but also a simple message: childhood obesity is a growing epidemic (Homer & Simpson, 2007, p. 442). Discussion The proposed evaluation design for this anti-childhood obesity program should ideally be a mixed method. This will entail assessing the socio-cultural, policy and also the physical environments of the pre-school (kindergarten) pupils in both home and school settings. This is to observe, detect and monitor if there were higher healthy eating habits of the kids due to the program. This will also determine if the kids engaged in more physical activities as a result of the program as it goes along during the two-year implementation period as proposed. The best results can be obtained by combination of data gathering such as parent survey questionnaires, direct observation by getting the weight of the kids at every three-month intervals and a visit to the home to see the actual home environment if it is conducive to program compliance. The schools principals and teachers will also be interviewed as to how the program is progressing. The evaluation design will hopefully help to reveal any barriers to successful implementation which can be resolved soonest by the affected stakeholder groups (de Silva-Sanigorski et al., 2010, p. 288). Program evaluation can be supplemented by talking to the kids themselves. The program will be evaluated using a variety of information and data sources but the most important part of the data will the actual weight of the kids taken from the start of their first year in kindergarten (kinder-1) and their weights at the end of kindergarten 2. This will be the most important criteria by which to judge the success or failure of the program. On the other hand, other measures to evaluate program properly will be using the number of physical activities the kids had engaged in based on the reports of the teachers as well as from the field reports to be filed by the researchers after each visit either to the school or to the childs home. The programs eventual success will be measured by the total number of kids who were being prevented from becoming obese during their formative years when habits are being acquired and new sources of information such as television can have lasting influences on them. Data collection sources for this program will come mainly from three areas or groups of people: the school faculty (teachers and principals), the parents and the kids. In the case of the faculty, they will monitor the type and number of physical activities the kids had engaged in during their school hours. Additionally, they will also be the ones to implement the school- approved modified curriculum that incorporated the health educational modules using graphic charts to illustrate the food pyramid and the importance of healthy eating habits and nutrition. These modules can best be shown and taught to the kids right before they will have the breaks or recess for snacks or alternatively, before their dismissal from the school. This will allow for greater retention of the lessons being taught to the kids as they head for home. The data from the parents will be coming from open-ended questionnaires that will be a help in making the assessment of the program. A survey questionnaire will just consist of 10 questions so that parents will not find it burdensome or time consuming to fill up and answer. Preferably, the survey questions need to be changed every three months. This will coincide in the program intervals during which the kids individual weight measurements are being taken. Doing two things at the same time and the same place will greatly help reduce program costs. It will minimize the need to conduct the interview on a different time and so free up precious researcher time that could be spent more productively elsewhere. The third source of data information will be the kids and this is best implemented by using a lunchbox survey with the help of a teachers aide or assistant. The questionnaire for the kids will be in the form of a simple yes or no format to make data collection convenient. This data collection exercise can be done once a week, preferably during Fridays each week. This higher frequency of data gathering will help in detecting early any signs of complacency in the programs implementation and if so, what additional resources can be employed to help the kids sustain their interest in the program over the long term. The types of information that will be provided by the data collection exercise will be a selection of the criteria used to determine the prevalence and incidence of obesity in the kids. This will include their actual weight measurements taken at three-month intervals, the number of physical activities they engaged in per week of school, the type of foods they eat at home as well as the kinds of food they bring to school. Other possible inclusion in data gathering is the type and number of fruits and vegetables eaten during the week. Other vital information gathered from the data collection activities will include all the causative factors in childhood obesity and these should not be limited to the ethnic or social or economic factors that characterized each childs family. Childhood obesity experts have noted that the prevalence of obesity among young kids is not limited by age, gender, income level or ethnicity (Crawford, Story, Wang, Ritchie & Sabry, 2001, p. 855). Rather, these experts said a childs obesity problem is caused mainly by environmental factors such as reduced physical activities and increased rates of energy intake. Information on this aspect will help guide the program evaluators to revise their program and focus instead on local environmental factors such as how food is served at home that will encourage the eating of more balanced diets and the prohibition of snack foods advertisements in the schools cafeteria or even the selling of these foods within the school grounds. Prohibitions like these will help to reinforce in kids young minds the importance of preventing obesity even in their early formative years. Additional information regarding social or ethnic background will be gathered to show how these factors will help in the screening of children who are considered at risk for obesity. African-American and Hispanic children have higher rates of obesity compared to the whites, but data is missing or lacking regarding obesity rates among Asian- or Native Americans too. The extra information will allow for the intervention program to be slightly modified to help those belonging to certain ethnic minorities to combat obesity through lifestyle changes. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods will be used to produce a more comprehensive set of data. Quantitative methods are used to measure individual weight of the kids, the number of physical exercises or activities performed each entire week and other data like how many miles they walked in going to the school and back to their homes. These can be obtained from the parents who will provide estimates of distances traveled. Even the World Bank has recognized the value of integrating both quantitative and qualitative methods such as its evaluation of poverty incidence rates in the Third World countries because this approach is better able to capture the contextual and non-contextual data (Bamberger, 2000, p. 3). Qualitative methods will deal with descriptions of a childs behavior such as whether a child is observed to be more active as a result of the obesity intervention program or how the child feels after eating some fruits or vegetables. These descriptive information will be given by the faculty and the parents alike through the open-ended questionnaire survey forms. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are useful, the former being able to provide incidence and trends in obesity while the latter help program planners understand the importance of the many social, cultural, economic and ethnic factors that predispose a child to obesity. Conclusion Obesity is a serious enough problem to attract the attention of health care professionals in the private sector and also those in the government who formulate public health policies. A good intervention program must be well designed by having a needs assessment phase to have a better grasp of the programs objectives and how well these objectives are attained. An issue that also needs to be tackled is how to evaluate the program as it is being implemented so that those who fund the program and provide its resources will know if it is effective or not. The data collection methods must be unassailable so that data will be credible. All the stakeholders mentioned earlier must cooperate to make the program successful as kids health is important. Reference List Bamberger, M. (2000). Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Research in Development. Washington, D.C.: World Bank Publications. Crawford, P. B., Story, M., Wang, M. C., Ritchie, L. D. & Sabry, Z. I. (2001, Aug.). Ethnic Issues in the Epidemiology of Childhood Obesity. Pediatric Clinics of North America, 48 (4), pp. 855-78. de Silva-Sanigorski, A., Prosser, L., Carpenter, L., . . . Waters, E. (2010, May 28). Evaluation of the Childhood Obesity Prevention Program: Kids – Go For Your Life (K-GFYL). BioMed Central Public Health, 10: 288. Homer, C. & Simpson, L. A. (2007, Mar-Apr). Childhood Obesity: Whats Health Care Got to do With it? Health Affairs (Project Hope), 26 (2), pp. 441-4. Royse, D., Thyer, B. A. & Padgett, D. K. (2009). Program Evaluation: An Introduction Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning. Willis, B. D. (1994). Distance Education: Strategies and Tools. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications, Inc. Read More