Reference no: EM132673707 , Length: word count:2000

Designing an Integrated Evaluation Project Assignment

For this assignment, you must develop an evaluation plan for an early childhood obesity program called Healthy Eating - Having Fun, which is being piloted in long day care centres, childcare centres and kindergartens in South Australia. You will find details about the program below.

You are asked to develop a detailed evaluation plan based on the framework outlined by Round et al (2005) in Planning for Effective Health Promotion Evaluation. You should use an integrated approach to design your evaluation, drawing on mixed methods, and must include economic evaluation

Scenario
Childhood obesity is a major problem throughout the world today. In Australia, 25% of children and adolescents aged 5 - 17 are overweight or obese2 and obese children are more likely to become obese adults and be at higher risk of developing chronic diseases such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, asthma and cardiovascular disease.

There are also major economic costs of obesity, which this has been estimated to be $8.6 billion dollars in 2011/2012. Of major concern is that 20% of children in Australia aged 2 - 4 years are overweight or obese2 and in South Australia, 23.2% of children aged 2 - 17 years were estimated to be overweight or obese in 2017 - 2018.4 There is strong evidence that establishing healthy eating and physical activity behaviour in childhood can reduce the risk of excessive weight gain.

Given the very early age of the overweight and obesity in children, it has been suggested that early childhood services (ECS)1 may be an appropriate place to implement obesity prevention programs in children.

The SA Department for Health and Wellbeing, working with the SA Department for Education has developed an obesity program which it is trialling in a number of childcare centres and preschools/kindergartens in Adelaide: The Healthy Eating - Having Fun program.
The goal of the Healthy Eating - Having Fun program is to develop the knowledge and skills of early childhood service staff to promote and encourage healthy eating and physical activity habits and reduce small screen recreation in children birth to 5 years who attend long day care centres and pre-schools in South Australia.
The intervention consists of:
(i) a one-day professional development workshop for preschool staff, delivered by a specialized early childhood training organization
(ii) resources for preschools which included a manual and a small grant to support staff to attend training or purchase physical activity equipment for the preschool
(iii) contact with health promotion professionals from SA Health to provide additional advice to preschools to support the delivery of the program messages include:
• Choose water as a drink;
• Choose healthier snacks
• Eat more fruit and vegetables;
• Get active every day
• Turn off the television and computer and get active.
Kindergarten and long day care centres nominated a staff member to attend a one- day workshop which provided training on
(i) healthy eating and ways of incorporating food-based activities into their education program;
(ii) physical activity and ways of incorporating fun, games-based skills activities into their program;
(iii) strategies to encourage children to limit their recreational screen time;
(iv) providing opportunities for children to engage in unstructured physically active play
(v) developing and implementing healthy nutrition and physical activity fundraising policies within their setting.
• The Healthy Eating - Having Fun is currently being trialled in 6 Early Childhood Services in Mt Barker South Australia (this does not include out of hours school care services - OHSC).
• It is also being trialled at the Mt Barker Kindergarten:
You have been asked to develop an integrated evaluation plan to evaluate this initial implementation of the program.

REPORT REQUIREMENTS
You should structure your written submission around the steps for evaluation planning outlined by Round et al (2005).
You should provide an Introduction which outlines the evidence and justification for implementing an obesity program in children aged 0 -5 and why such a program might be trialled in South Australia and Mt Barker in particular. Then complete the Integrated Evaluation plan steps. Use these steps as sub-headings in your paper:

1. Describe the program
- Include the setting and location, program goal, target population, objectives, interventions, and the process and impact indicators which can tell you if you are achieving your goal
- You need to write the objectives for this program - these are what will help you evaluate your program.
- Objectives relate to the way the program is being implemented (process) or to how you will measure impact (e.g. knowledge and skills and behaviour change are related to impact). See https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/toolkits/health-promotion/4/types-of-evaluation

2. Evaluation preview
- Include how you will engage stakeholders, the purpose of evaluation, and the key evaluation questions.
- For the purposes of this assessment, you do not need to consider resources required to conduct the evaluation (e.g., budget, expertise) - you can assume your evaluation team has sufficient resources.

3. Focus the evaluation design
- Your design should include two components:
1. An evaluation planning process grid to outline how you will evaluate performance against your program objectives, using at least two different methods/data sources. The grid should be included as an appendix to your report.
2. A proposed health economic evaluation, to inform decision-making about future funding of the program. This should include the study perspective, an appropriate time horizon, health care resources (including averted costs), health outcomes (commonly used in economic evaluation), and sensitivity analysis.

4. Collect data
- You will not actually collect data, but you should consider how you will sample and recruit participants, and what data collection methods and instruments you will use, for both components of your evaluation design.
- You must provide examples of your proposed data collection tools - e.g include a sample survey or if you are proposing to use a number of surveys, then include a sample of questions from each survey. If you propose to use interviews or focus groups provide examples of your questions in the appendix.

5. Analyse and interpret data
- You will not actually analyse data, but you should consider the type of analysis that may be appropriate for the data you propose collecting. Remember, you have been asked to design a mixed methods evaluation so you will need to include how you will analyse the data for the different types of data you are collecting
- You should consider how the findings of different evaluation methods could be integrated and used to inform each other.

6. Disseminate lessons learnt
- Include what type of different reports you will be preparing and who those reports are for.
You must cite any sources and references used to inform your plan and you must use an appropriate range of references. You can use Harvard referencing styles.

Word count: 2000 words (excluding references and appendices)

Attachment:- 1Evaluation.rar