1 Introducing the Early Childhood Health Promotion Toolkit
This section explains how the Early Childhood Health Promotion started. Take a look at the video where Jackie introduces and explains the origins of the Early Childhood Health Promotion Toolkit.
In the video, Jackie describes how when she came to look for some resources or publications that were relevant to and specifically written for practitioners in early childhood settings, there was almost nothing available. There are many very useful websites from a range of organisations which do include relevant information and guidance, but there was a need to bring the resources into one location to make access easier. As well as bringing resources and information together in one place, there was also a need to create an approach that would support and guide practitioners to identify the health priorities in their settings. And this is how the Toolkit was born!
Download this video clip.Video player: Video 1 Introducing the Early Childhood Health Promotion Toolkit
Transcript: Video 1 Introducing the Early Childhood Health Promotion Toolkit
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.
Video 1 Introducing the Early Childhood Health Promotion Toolkit
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The following is a summary of the points Jackie makes in the video:
- Health promotion is looking at ways that behaviour can be shaped or changed to promote the best possible outcomes, so that people feel well and can reduce the risk of developing illnesses and health problems. Health promotion is often associated with health education campaigns that are aimed at adults. However, it is really important that babies and children have opportunities to promote their health, and of course, babies and children can’t do this by themselves – they need support from the adults around them
- We need to work together, all adults who have responsibilities for educating and caring for children. It’s not just the responsibility of parents or of early years practitioners in nurseries, pre-school settings or childminders, we can all make a contribution.
- Child health promotion is embedded in early childhood education and care practice, for example the English EYFS states that ‘providers must promote good health’. However, there is a lack of research and resources that supports practitioners to carry out this. Because there is a lack of guidance and research, with her colleague, Professor Jane Payler at The Open University, Jackie developed a Toolkit to help support practitioners to identify how they can promote the health of babies and young children.
- The Toolkit includes information and resources about health promotion, and the Toolkit also includes the 5 steps, which are a series of steps that have been designed to guide practitioners about how they can carry out an audit of the health issues relating to babies and children in their setting. This will help them to gain a clear picture of the health issues that are a priority in their setting, and from this information they can identify a health promotion intervention that is relevant and realistic. And very importantly, at the end of the intervention, there is a final step that helps practitioner to evaluate how effective the Toolkit and the 5 steps were in supporting them with promoting health.
- Jackie says in the video that she was very privileged to be given the opportunity to test out the 5 steps in a nursery. Later in the course you’ll meet Jackie’s co-researcher and also with the managers of the nursery to hear their views about the use of the Toolkit.
The 5 steps of the Toolkit are summarised in the next section.