Evaluation of the healthy weight collaborative

Funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and developed by the National Initiative for Children's Healthcare Quality (NICHQ), the Healthy Weight Collaborative (HWC) is a national quality improvement effort to share and spread promising and evidence-based and promising practices to prevent and treat obesity among children, adolescents, and families. In this two-phased learning collaborative, NICHQ is working with approximately 50 community teams of primary care, public health, and community-based organizations to implement and test an integrated change package of evidence-based and promising healthy weight strategies. The HWC evaluation is using a developmental evaluation approach to track the evolution of the HWC model. Evaluation methods include observations of learning sessions and other team coaching activities, in-person and telephone interviews with HWC community teams, faculty, and staff; reviews of team documents, progress reports, improvement indicators, and project materials; and quantitative analyses of session feedback surveys, team collaboration measures, and team social network data. The HWC evaluation's final report, which will be completed by October 2013, will address the following research questions: How can the primary care, public health, and community-based sectors best be integrated into community-based healthy weight initiatives? How can community teams build and sustain collective measurement and quality improvement capacity? How can teams succeed in implementing, sustaining, and spreading HWC change package activities? How did the teams benefit from their involvement in the HWC? What valuable lessons does the HWC provide for future learning collaboratives and for community-based multi-sector obesity prevention and treatment?