Posts Tagged ‘School Health Index’

Lunch!

September 6th, 2011

Some of my most memorable moments of elementary school are about things that happened at lunchtime.  Back in the day, lunchtime lasted just as long as all the other periods.  It’s still that way in some places- but in others lunch hasn’t been competing for time as successfully with the other academic priorities. The School Nutrition Association’s recent report, State of School Nutrition 2011, found that short lunch periods continue to be a challenge for school nutrition professionals across the country. 

Partly because of the increasing pressure to include more academic work in the classroom, most kids aren’t getting the recommended levels of physical activity at school (including lunch) even though there’s growing evidence that physical activity and academic achievement go hand in hand.  The CDC recently published a review of published studies and found that physical activity during the school day improves cognitive skills and attitudes, enhances concentration and attention, and improves classroom behavior. Maybe it’s time to think about Lunch & PE as a subject that’s not just important for physical wellness, but as a tool to improve academic performance! 

So, who makes the decisions around the logistics of school lunch time?  It’s local school districts- but we can still have an influence by giving the districts and schools the tools they need to set good priorities.  We’ve been working with the Arizona Department of Education to help schools by promoting school health advisory councils and assessing school health using the School Health Index from CDC.  Parents, health professionals, and concerned community members can be part of a school advisory council to provide assistance and express concerns regarding school health, including school lunch times.

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AZ “Putting Prevention to Work”

May 16th, 2011

Last year we received funding from CDC to implement the Communities Putting Prevention to Work, which aims to achieve broad reaching, highly impactful, and sustainable change to reduce chronic disease burden associated with obesity and tobacco.

This week CDC notified us that Arizona is a “high performing” state. What does this mean? CDC will soon be visiting Arizona providing additional evaluation support to determine whether or not our program will be used as a “best practice” example for other states. Why did Arizona receive this award? In just 15 months, our team has leveraged our grant resources to improve physical activity and nutrition and cut tobacco use in Arizona schools, hospitals, worksites, and childcare facilities. Here are few examples of what the team has accomplished so far:

  • Trained over 20 hospitals and 2000 nurses on maternity care practices that encourage mothers to breastfeed and keep breastfeeding.
  • Helped create healthy schools where students can be physically active and have access to healthy foods, like fruits and vegetables.
  • Trained more than 200 school staff and partners to assess their nutrition and physical activity programs and policies using the CDC’s School Health Index.
  • Inspired over 500 parents, teachers, and administrators to create healthy change at their school with our new School Health Advisory Council Video.
  • Helped schools examine barriers that keep students from walking and biking to school safely by completing our online assessment, the Active School Neighborhood Checklist.

Imagine how many more Arizonans our team will impact with 9 more months to go! Congrats to our Nutrition and Physical Activity and their CPPW team!

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2011 Department Priorities Spotlight- Public Health Prevention

December 28th, 2010

The name of the game for Public Health Prevention in 2011 is integration and leverage.  Our Public Health Prevention Team will be focusing on the social determinants of health and working to implement policies, systems and environmental changes that make the healthy choices easy.  Here are some examples of our public health prevention priorities for the coming year:

Worksite Wellness

Perhaps one of the biggest leverage points for improving community health lies with Arizona employers.  Employers are increasingly recognizing that a healthier workforce is a more productive and efficient workforce and by applying simple public health prevention tools that can improve their productivity.  We’ll be using our Worksite Wellness Tool to help Arizona businesses to adopt wellness and health promotion activities for their employees.  The kinds of simple things we’ll be working with them on are smoking cessation, weight management, nutrition, heart disease prevention, diabetes prevention, etc.  Businesses that are self-insured (for health insurance) have double the potential gains because they’ll eventually benefit from worksite wellness with lowered premiums.

State Government Wellness

We’ll also build on our partnership with the ADOA to offer our services in augmenting the State wellness initiative and working with St. Luke’s Health Initiatives and others to make evidence based public health resources available to employers.  Included in this effort will be:

  1. Diabetes Self-Management Training -  Almost 10% of state employees have diabetes, and we’ll be partnering with ADOA to increase use of self-management (the cornerstone of treatment and care) to improve care;
  2. Launching a state-wide ”Hands Only” CPR initiative on three fronts:  Public (bystander) Awareness, Systems-Level Protocol Change (Dispatch – 911), and Worksite (employee) training;
  3. Design and launch a public awareness campaign focusing on early detection and effective disease management for Arizonans with colon, breast and cervical cancers;
  4. Expand our reach and utilization of tobacco cessation efforts via ASHline (phone and web-based services) among the behavioral health population, through partnering with some of our Regional Behavioral Health Authorities to create systems-based referrals in each behavioral health clinical site.

Nutrition & Food Stamps

We’ll also be working with other interested states and public health associations to change what foods qualify for purchase under the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP (formerly called food stamps).   This is an idea that is getting national attention, including a recent article in the American Journal of Public Health that outlined a number of ways to improve diets of SNAP participants along with everyone else. This issue will be considered when Congress votes on the new Farm Bill in 2013. The Healthy Hunger Free Act of 2010 signed by the President this week will strengthen nutrition education provided to SNAP participants by focusing on obesity prevention and allowing public health approaches to be more fully incorporated into SNAP nutrition education activities. Visit www.eatwellbewell.org to see the nutrition education currently available to families receiving SNAP benefits in Arizona (don’t miss the videos and games).

Breastfeeding

We’ll be continuing to press our efforts to make institutional changes in maternity care practices and increase breastfeeding initiation and duration.  Arizona’s “5 Baby Steps to Breastfeeding Success” are the hospital practices that make the biggest difference. Our Breastfeeding Team is working with Arizona Perinatal Trust to train 5,100 nurses in 31 APT-certified hospitals statewide on Arizona’s 5 Baby Steps to Breastfeeding Success. All of these hospitals are committed to changing their policies to support breastfeeding. The technical assistance from ADHS is the key in mentoring the hospitals through model policy training and moving the policy from paper to action.

Health in Schools

We’ll also be using a more coordinated approach as we work with Arizona schools on various health initiatives.  Our new school coordinating committee will continue to share resources, streamline access and improve outreach for all of our programs.  The bottom line is that healthy children learn better and offering daily physical education or daily school breakfast can improve academic performance. We’ll be helping schools to complete the CDCs School Health Index assessment tool that they can use to develop a plan to improve their health-related policies and programs.  Strengthening school wellness policies, supporting farm-to-school programs, and increasing physical activity throughout the school day are all high priorities for the collaborative work.  Check out the Coordinated School Health website at http://www.healthologyaz.com/ to learn more about school health in action.

Of course there will be alot more than just these things going on in public health prevention in 2011, but this gives you a taste of what’s up.

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Posted in Behavioral Health, Prevention

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