244136 Community Healthy Living Index: Assessing Early Childhood programs for supportive policy and practices

Wednesday, November 2, 2011: 12:30 PM

Katherine Hohman, MPH , YMCA of the USA, Washington, DC
Jeffrey Sunderlin, MS ATC , YMCA of the USA, Springfield, IL
The Community Healthy Living Index (CHLI) is a set of community assessment tools that measure opportunities for physical activity and healthy eating in schools, afterschool settings , neighborhoods, worksites, and community-at-large. These tools include a discussion/planning guide that moves the assessment into action planning for improvements. The YMCA of the USA, in partnership with Stanford Prevention Research Center, created a new tool for early childhood programs (ECP) that serve infants through 6 years. This tool complements the existing CHLI tools and was created to respond to community demand. In 2005, 61% of children aged 0-6 participated in a ECP. This is a critical time in children's lives, ECP are pivotal to establish a child's learning and behavior preferences by intentionally promoting the health and well-being of children through policies and practices that support healthy choices. Recognizing this, states are actively adopting model healthy eating and physical activity guidance to improve or enhance ECP and this tool will serve to support this process.

The ECP tool development included community led cognitive response testing and inter-rater reliability testing to ensure assessment instrument validity. Similar to the original CHLI tools, the ECP tool provides a process for community stakeholders to assess and create an action plan to improve the policy and environment related to physical activity and healthy eating in this setting. Findings from the ECP assessment and lessons learned from the field will be shared to provide details on the direct application of the use of the tool by communities.

Learning Areas:
Assessment of individual and community needs for health education
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs
Public health or related organizational policy, standards, or other guidelines

Learning Objectives:
1.Access a set of tools that provides community benefit related to educating stakeholders on policy and environmental strategies for physical activity and healthy eating and provides opportunity for partnership development. 2.Identify opportunities for physical activity and healthy eating in early childhood programs using Community Healthy Living Index. 3.Conduct a discussion and improvement planning session to identify policy and environmental changes to better support physical activity and healthy eating within early childhood programs

Keywords: Policy/Policy Development, Community Collaboration

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: Part of development team of the assessment, and provide technical assistance to communitites on its use.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

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.