Transcript

SPEAKER 1

Health promotion is looking at ways that we can improve health, preventing illnesses, and encouraging people to develop really good habits in relation to health promoting activities throughout life. Health promotion is often associated with health education campaigns aimed at adults, but it's really important that babies and young children learn really good habits early on in life, and of course, they can't do this on their own. They need support.

All adults have a responsibility to support and promote good health habits for children. This includes parents, teachers, pre-school nursery settings, health professionals and anybody who's working with children in children's services. Child health promotion is embedded in curricula relating to preschool and school. For instance, in England we have the early years foundation stage, and many of the aims and principles will naturally develop good health promotion behaviors.

However, there wasn't a great deal of information available to support practitioners to achieve these aims and principles that are linked to health promotion activities. So for this reason I worked with Jane Paylor, one of the professors at the Open University, to produce a toolkit which is a document that has lots of information in it, but importantly, it has five steps within the toolkit that are aimed at supporting practitioners to really look at how they can improve the health of the children and the babies in their setting.

So within the toolkit, the five steps are laid out very clearly. The first step encourages settings to do an audit of the health issues that are within their setting. And then when they have a clear overview of what the issues are, step two, helps them to identify an intervention that will improve the health of all the babies and children.

Step three, helps the practitioners to look at how they aim to implement the intervention. What are the hoped for outcomes from putting this intervention in place. Step four, is the midway evaluation. How is it going? What could be done better? What could be done differently? And then the step five, is looking at the value of what has been done, and again how can they carry this work forward because it's really important that it doesn't just stop.

So I wrote the toolkit and then I wanted to trial it out, so I was really privileged and very pleased when Nicola and Karen, who the managers of a preschool setting, agreed to work with me and trial out the five step and the tool kit.