Public Health meets Clinical Care: Multi-year Interventions for adolescent obesity prevention at 3 SBHCS

Working with middle and high school students to encourage healthy diet and activity habits and to decrease BMI is labor-intensive and can be frustrating. Individual medical and health education visits seem to have limited impact, and population level interventions in school settings are costly to run and difficult to evaluate. Health inequities in the accessibility of healthy food, safe places to exercise and protection from toxic stress make these efforts even more difficult in schools serving the poor. Three middle school health centers serving primarily African American, Latino and Asian youth in medically underserved East Oakland have implemented a model for group health education and medical visits with the support of the County Health Department, a local university, and three different grant mechanisms. The panel will share the multidisciplinary components and the results of this program as it evolved over two school years. Clinicians and researchers in these projects are participating in the APHA’s Center for School, Health and Education’s Public Health Capacity Assistance for School Health Care Leaders and have used this support to develop innovative ways to link clinic visits with interventions that address social determinants of overweight and obesity.  Changes in physical outcomes, self-efficacy, overall utilization of the SBHC and connections to the school over 19 months will be presented.  The benefits of a University-community partnership and implications for long-term sustainable projects addressing overweight and obesity will be discussed.