CHILDREN HEALTHCARE

Children Healthcare

Children Healthcare

Introduction

It is acknowledged that nutrition education is a key constituent of lifelong healthy eating and should start from the early stages of life (Pérez-Rodrigo and Aranceta, 2001). Flynn et al. (2006), in reviewing best practice in reducing obesity and related chronic disease in children and young people, noted that there are few such interventions in the pre-school setting and recommended that funding should be directed to develop prevention programmes in this area.

Physical And Health Needs Of Children

There has been an increase in obesity and overweight observed in early aged children in many countries (Mårild et al., 2004) and this is no different in England with the National Children's Food Survey (Irish Universities Nutrition Alliance, 2005) reporting a two-fold increase in overweight in school age boys, and a three-fold increase in obesity in school age girls, since the Irish National Nutrition Survey of 1990 (Lee and Cunningham, 1990).

The Food and Nutrition Guidelines for Pre-school Services (DOHC, 2004) recommend that children in full day care (more than 5 hours) are offered at least two meals and two snacks whilst in the pre-school service. Currently, in England, there is no uniform formal training for pre-school providers in neither the area of nutrition and healthy food provision, nor the legislation to enforce such training. As Food and Nutrition Guidelines for pre-schools are not mandatory, methods to encourage the provision of nutritious food in this setting must be investigated, implemented and evaluated.

The aim of this paper is to:

1.Describe the modification and testing of the HIP Project's SEF; and

2.Summarise the findings of a preliminary study of nutritional practices in preschools using the updated SEF.

Method to Meet Children's Effective Need

Sample Population

All eligible full day care pre-schools in one county in England (Wicklow) (n=34), were contacted by the researcher and invited to take part in the study. Pre-schools with any previous contact with the Community Nutrition Service in the Midland Area that was carrying out the study were excluded. A total of 12 pre-schools agreed to participate. Permission to carry out the study in each school was initially obtained by telephone; written-informed consent was also received from each pre-school manager before commencement of the study. Ethical approval for the project was obtained from the Research Ethics Committee of the HSE Dublin Mid-Leinster, England and the Ethics Committee of the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Scored Evaluation Form Modification

Each criterion on the original SEF (Table I) was checked to ensure no overlap between or within criteria existed, and a comprehensive literature review was carried out on each criterion to establish that all criteria were based on evidence of effectiveness.

Literature review was carried out on each of the criterion/questions on the SEF. Papers were collected on each criterion in the SEF to determine best practice and compare all aspects of SEF to literature, to ensure the SEF measured best practice. Best practice was defined in the case of each criterion on the SEF. If it was not possible to identify best practice then a common sense approach was taken with ...