210555 Policy and environmental approaches to obesity prevention: Lessons from the evaluation of Kaiser Permanente's Community Health Initiative

Tuesday, November 10, 2009: 9:40 AM

Pamela Schwartz, MPH , Community Benefit, Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, CA
Bill Beery, MPH , Center for Community Health and Evaluation, Group Health Community Foundation, Seattle, WA
Allen Cheadle, PhD , Department of Health Services, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Suzanne M. Rauzon, MPH, RD , Dr. Robert C. and Veronica Atkins Center for Weight and Health, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
The Kaiser Permanente (KP) Community Health Initiative (CHI) is a program-wide strategy for improving the health of communities served by KP. The thematic focus is on "Healthy Eating, Active Living" (HEAL) - promoting improvements in nutrition and physical activity and reductions in overweight/obesity. The CHI intervention approach is to use environmental and policy changes to promote population-level improvements in levels of physical activity and proportions of the population eating a healthy diet. Thirty communities in five KP regions are currently implementing CHI. A comprehensive, cross-site evaluation is being conducted covering the five years of CHI implementation (2006-2011). Evaluation methods include baseline and follow-up population-level surveys of youth and adults, and documentation of community programmatic and environmental changes taking place as a result of CHI. This presentation will provide an overview of the design for the CHI cross-site evaluation, describe policy and environmental changes taking place in the CHI communities, and present baseline population-level findings and evaluation lessons learned to date.

Learning Objectives:
At the conclusion of this presentation the participants will be able to: 1. Describe an approach to evaluating community health initiatives targeting policy and environmental change; 2. Describe methods for assessing population-level health status; 3. Identify challenges and lessons learned for the evaluation of a complex, multi-site community health initiative.

Keywords: Obesity, Evaluation

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: Director, Program Evaluation at Kaiser Permanente. Directs evaluation of Community Health Initiative.
Any relevant financial relationships? Yes

Name of Organization Clinical/Research Area Type of relationship
Kaiser Pemanente evaluation Employment (includes retainer)

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.