Communities and Schools Together for Childhood Obesity Prevention

描述（由申请人提供）：儿童肥胖的日益流行，以及人们对从儿童期持续到成年期的慢性疾病性质的认识不断提高，已成为美国主要的公共卫生问题。越来越多的证据表明，对儿童肥胖最重要的两个影响因素是营养和体育活动。虽然学校经常被认为是解决儿童肥胖和相关公共卫生问题的最有能力的环境，但它们在单独提供这些社会干预方面面临着极大的挑战。与此同时，学校无法达到的环境和社会影响正逐渐被认为是儿童肥胖发展的主要决定因素（医学研究所，2005年）。跨越学校和社区之间的鸿沟和联系，存在着改变方法和社区-学校关系的机会，以更有效地解决这一日益严重的全国性肥胖流行病。基于社区的参与性研究（CBPR）为组织地方能力以理解和应对这些复杂的、多系统的卫生问题提供了一种急需的战略。社区与学校共同（CAST）研究旨在建立一种学校与社区的合作伙伴关系，以发现针对当地儿童肥胖健康风险的研究解决方案。这项研究的合作伙伴包括俄勒冈州郊区/农村社区一个招收3000名学生的小学学区。社区合作伙伴包括一个多学科的组织成员小组，重点关注食品系统环境、家长培训和健康教育；在评估营养政策和实践、社区建设环境和体育活动获取和支持方面经验丰富的大学学术项目；还有一个研究组织，能够协助衡量和评估以社区为基础的干预措施，以支持社区和学校减少儿童肥胖的努力。为了协助开展CAST CBPR，我们建议建立一个社区卫生监测系统，作为社区卫生需求研究的知识库。该CHMS将有助于跟踪儿童肥胖率，分析肥胖的环境和社会影响，并制定有效和及时的社区肥胖预防和干预计划。CAST合作伙伴将对当地社会、建筑环境和食品环境对儿童健康的影响和因素进行研究，开发和评估社区开发的、数据驱动的父母健康干预计划，并记录计划过程，并合作开发研究方法和结果，以便持续传播和复制CAST计划。公共卫生相关性：该项目将建立社区-学校伙伴关系，研究影响小学生肥胖风险的环境因素。该项目将建立一个以社区为基础的健康监测系统，作为预防肥胖合作的研究储存库，并作为在其他社区使用的研究工具。该项目还将开发和评估一个以研究为基础的协作式育儿课程，以减少社区儿童肥胖的风险。将通过既定的建筑和食物系统研究方法评估学校社区的儿童健康，这将衡量社区在支持积极的儿童健康结果方面的相对优势和挑战。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The growing epidemic of childhood obesity, and increasing awareness about the nature of chronic diseases that persist from childhood into adulthood, has become a major public health concern in the United States. Evidence continues to mount that the two most important influences on childhood obesity are nutrition and physical activity. While schools are often cited as the most capable environment to address childhood obesity and related public health concerns, they face extreme challenges in providing these social interventions alone. At the same time, environmental and social influence beyond the reach of schools are becoming recognized as the major determinants in the development of childhood obesity (Institute of Medicine, 2005). Across this divide and connection between schools and communities, an opportunity exists to transform approaches and community-school relationships to more effectively address this growing national obesity epidemic. Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) offers a much needed strategy for organizing local capacity in understanding and responding to these complex, multi-systemic health issues. The Communities and Schools Together (CAST) study seeks to build a collaborative school-community partnership to discover researched solutions to local obesity health risks for children. Partners in this proposed study include an elementary school district with an enrollment of 3,000 students in a suburban/rural community in Oregon. Community partners include a multidisciplinary group of organizational members focused on food system environments, parent training and health education; university academic programs experienced in assessing nutritional policies and practice, community built environments, and physical activity access and supports; and a research organization capable of assisting in measuring and evaluating community-based interventions to support of communities and schools in their efforts to reduce childhood obesity. To assist this CAST CBPR, we propose the development of a community health monitoring system to serve as community-based repository for research on local health needs. This CHMS will help track rates of child obesity, analyzing environmental and social influences of obesity, and developing strategies for effective and timely community-based obesity prevention and intervention programs. CAST partners will conduct research on local social, built environment, and food environment influences and factors related to child health, develop and evaluate a community developed, data driven parent health intervention program, and document program processes and collaboratively developed research methods and findings for ongoing dissemination and replication of the CAST program. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The project will develop a community-school partnership to research environmental factors influencing obesity risk among elementary school children. This project will create a Community-Based Health Monitoring system to serve as a research repository for obesity prevention collaboration and a research tool for use in other communities. The project will also develop and evaluate a collaborative and research-based parenting curriculum to reduce community risks of obesity among children. School neighborhoods will be assessed for children}s health via established built- and food-system research methods, which will measure the relative strengths and challenges of neighborhoods for support of positive child health outcomes.