Evaluation of the Healthy Lifestyles Initiative

Program Plan

Table 1. Logic Model with Measurement Plan.

Inputs	Activities	Outputs	Target Group
Staff, children, community parks, and money for the program implementation	Staff will educate children on the importance of physical activity and encourage them to visit such places	Healthy nutrition and activity education for children and their parents; assistance with difficulties	Obese children, their parents

Outcome Plan

Short Term	Intermediate Term (Impact)	Long Term (Impact)
The program participants will learn new skills and knowledge regarding their disease; Their opinions and aspirations will change towards healthy lifestyles.	Children will practice exercising and reduce their weight; Their behaviors and decisions will be more conscious; Parents may contribute to new social action and policies in the field.	In social and environmental terms, the participants and their future children will be less prone to develop overweight and obesity; From civic and economic points, the society will take a step towards the solution of the global epidemic of obesity by initiating proper interventions.

Measurement Plan

Success Indicator	Outcome Measuring Tools	Evaluation Design
Decrease in weight; Increase in awareness; Maintenance of physical activity throughout the program.	Survey Health data evaluation Interviews	Data will be collected before, in the middle, and at the end of the program by means of interviews and observation by nurses.

My vision of the program evaluation strengthened through this course as I learned to reveal the key elements that are essential to assess programs. Now, I have relevant knowledge and skills to understand the outputs, inputs, and outcomes of programs, which makes the evaluation more detailed and clear. At the beginning of the course, I was not fully aware of the instruments and types of assessment, and I doubted the way I did my first assignment. For example, I found that the CDC’s Framework for Program Evaluation is a useful guide that allows a nurse leader to pay attention to the key concepts and points of the target program. In general, I consider that my first table completed with regard to the selected program is quite vague, while the logical model used for this task is much more comprehensive yet understandable.

The evaluation of the Healthy Lifestyles Initiative was conducted by the CDC to reveal the effectiveness of this program. Berman et al. (2015) applied the summative type of evaluation with the purpose of clarifying whether the program worked or not. The main goal of the selected program was to provide tools to improve the capacity of the community to help obese children. 170 healthcare organizations were given the initiative to be implemented in their facilities, and 218 partners were assigned the role of working with it. In their assessment, the authors posed such objective as to focus on policy, systems, and environment that were expected to promote active living and healthy eating in the participants. In order to answer the question about the success or failure of the program, the researchers briefly identified the intervention used and discussed the evaluation methods. In particular, eighty partners of the program completed the online survey, and the linear regression was utilized as a means to determine associations between the constructs, including strategies, materials, and policies used.

It seems important to present measurement points that were specified by the author to evaluate the program. For example, the organization type, systems and environmental policies, materials, and additional support necessity were integrated into the survey. In other words, the summary of all the points was regarded as the indicators of the program results. The assessment detected that 30-35 percent of the program strategies were used by the partners in their practice, as stated by Berman et al. (2015). Among the materials that were offered to children most often, there were posters and educational handouts. Those care givers who completed action plans and implemented various interventions were proved to achieve better patient outcomes compared to their colleagues. For children, healthy eating and physical activity interventions were the most attractive interventions. In addition, food preparation training for parents along with healthy lifestyle screenings were extensively used by the program partners as implementation interventions. Approximately half of the partners reported that they wanted additional support with the suggested strategies, which points to the need to adjust the program.

It should be stressed that the identified evaluation is the first that targeted the assessment of the community capacity to help obese children and prevent this disease. The authors mentioned that the findings they obtained show that currently, the community has great potential to act in collaboration with healthcare organizations, yet some adjustments should be made. One should pay attention to the fact that the evaluation demonstrates that a range of useful interventions exists, but every organizational context is different. In this connection, environmental approaches, systems, and policies assumed by the Healthy Lifestyles Initiative should be accommodated to a particular setting and patient needs. It is also evident that further research should be conducted to create more options for evidence-based practice. The ways the community may promote educational interventions and increase children and their parents’ engagement are to be studied in detail.

Reference

Berman, M., Bozsik, F., Shook, R. P., Meissen-Sebelius, E., Markenso, D., Summar S. … Carlson, J. A. (2018). Evaluation of the Healthy Lifestyles Initiative for improving community capacity for childhood obesity prevention. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 15. Web.