Podcast: Improving the implementation of school-based policies and practices to improve student health

Alongside learning about mathematics, history, languages and many other things, schools are a recommended setting for interventions to improve health. However, it can be difficult to implement these interventions and, in November 2017, Luke Wolfenden of the University of Newcastle in Callaghan, Australia and colleagues published their new Cochrane Review looking into how this might be done. Luke tells us what they found in this podcast. Although there are a variety of school-based interventions that improve the diet, physical activity and weight status of school students or reduce their risk of harmful alcohol or tobacco use, their implementation in schools is not routine. Broadly, therefore, our objective was to review strategie s that might be used to improve the implementation of school-based interventions which target student diet, activity, obesity, tobacco or alcohol use. Unfortunately, we’ve found that the current evidence base is weak for such an important topic.The sorts of thing that might be done when a health promoting intervention is introduced into a school include training, audit and feedback or incentives. We looked for randomized and non-randomized trials that had assessed the impact of these and other strategies on how well the health promoting intervention was implemented. The strategies could target policies and practices in the school environment such as changes to cafeteria offerings, or the school curriculum itself, such as the introduction of physic...
Source: Cochrane News and Events - Category: Information Technology Authors: Source Type: news