Evaluation of public health professionals’ capacity to implement environmental changes supportive of healthy weight

Abstract

Community-based interventions to promote healthy weights by making environmental and policy changes in communities may be an important strategy in reversing the obesity epidemic. However, challenges faced by local public health professionals in facilitating effective environmental and policy change need to be better understood and addressed. To better understand capacity-building needs, this study evaluated the efforts of the Healthy Start Partnership, a university-community project to promote healthy weights in young families in a rural eight-county area of upstate New York. Qualitative interviews (n = 30) and pre/post surveys (n = 31) were conducted over three years of the intervention. Challenges faced by partners significantly slowed progress of environmental interventions in some communities. First, many partners did not feel their “regular” jobs afforded them sufficient time to do community work. Second, many partners did not feel they had the personal political power to work on broader environmental, policy, or system change issues. Third, facilitating and policy change and reaching out to non-traditional partners, like businesses, required developing a new set of public health skills. Fourth, the long-time frame of environmental and policy work meant that many efforts would exceed the grant period. Building local public health leaders for environmental and policy change necessitates that these challenges are acknowledged and addressed.

The Healthy Start Partnership

“…13 So, it is not too surprising that the interventions community partners developed tended to be more informational and aimed at aspects of the social environment rather than aimed at changing major physical and economic structures in communities. That said, partners did implement interventions that they considered to be changes in the physical environment.…”

“…The evaluation of the capacity-building focus was recently published and is not the focus of this article. 13 This article focuses on the programs developed by the HSP, evidence of effects on key behaviors, and on populationlevel weight outcome measures for women and their infants.…”

The Eat Well, Eat Local, Eat Together (Eat3) Nutrition Education Campaign

“…In 2007 and 2008 the members of the Healthy Start Partnership (HSP, a collaborative of community-and university-based health and nutrition professionals) 6 could not find any examples of nutrition campaigns directed toward members of the general public that combined nutrition and health objectives with the social and ecological objectives in a single program. Thus, this group set out to develop such an educational campaign and the result was "Eat Well, Eat Local, Eat Together" (Eat 3 ).…”

Speeding the Dissemination and Implementation of Evidence-Based Interventions for Cancer Control and Prevention

“…Practitioners are often overwhelmed by the number of EBIs and may lack the information and guidance needed to use them in practice [19][20][21]. In response, synthesis translation systems are partnering with practitioners to translate EBIs into formats that better address practitioners' needs and priorities.…”