Funding outcome

Childhood obesity is a growing public health concern. Today, one in three Canadian children has overweight or obesity. Evidence suggests childhood overweight and obesity is associated with increased co-morbidities, decreased quality of life and increased health care costs. It is therefore imperative to develop approaches to prevent this rising trend of childhood obesity and to negate the negative impacts of health for Canadian children. Given that children spend almost half of their time in the school environment, schools are an ideal place to promote healthy lifestyle behaviours. School based interventions which have been successful in making changes to children's health include those that have adopted the Comprehensive School Health (CSH) framework. CSH recognizes the importance of education, the physical and social environment, community partnerships and polices as integral factors affecting healthy behaviours in school-aged children. While the work in schools continues to be important, there are limits to the amount of work that can be done during the school hours. Therefore, CSH programs are gradually expanding into the after-school hours. However, little is known with regards to the applicability of CSH for after-school programs. To address this concern, Ever Active Schools, a provincial leader in the development and support of healthy school communities, created an after-school initiative called 'School's Out ... Let's Move. Ever Active Schools recognizes the essential components of the CSH framework and thus applies the 'whole setting' concept in the School's Out ... Let's Move intervention. The overall goal of the School's Out ... Let's Move project is to determine how a 'whole setting' approach can help school-age children improve their healthy eating (HE) and physical activity (PA) and maintain and or achieve healthy weights by promoting and providing healthy choices within an after-school setting. The proposed research will focus on the role of the care providers during the implementation of School's Out ... Let's Move. Specifically, this research will examine the care providers' knowledge, awareness and confidence of providing health promoting opportunities; their facilitation of HE and PA and their overall perspectives on the intervention.