Developing a Health Project to Reduce the Incidence of Obesity in Children

This article discusses the development of a health project to reduce the incidence of obesity in children. It covers the five priority areas of the Ottawa Charter for health promotion and how they can be applied to this issue. The project, called 'The Future Child', aims to implement lifestyle-based interventions for children aged 5-11 in the city of Casey, with a goal of a 5kg weight loss within the first four months. The article also highlights the importance of addressing childhood obesity and the potential long-term health risks associated with it.

Running head: HEALTH PROMOTION
HEALTH PROMOTION
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

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Introduction:
Health promotion can be defined as an approach that includes planned combination of
environmental, political, educational, organisational as well as regulatory mechanism that in turn
support conditions as well as actions of living with better quality health among individuals,
groups as well as communities (Sallis et al., 2015). The main purpose of health promotion is to
influence the health behaviour of individual as well as communities positively as well as
modifying the living and working conditions of individuals helping influencing their health. The
Ottawa Charter proposed by the world health organisation (primarily as a response of the
growing expectations of the new public health movement in the world) is seen to contain five
important priority action areas. This helps health promotion professionals to develop health
campaigns correctly targeting the audiences and their needs and requirements to develop high
quality life (Waters et al., 2018). Obesity has contributed to the disease burden of Australia to
large extent and has not even left behind the children. Today, the nation is seen to have one in
every four children from the age of 2 to 17 to be overweight or obese. This is not only leading
them to poor quality life but is also exposing to different types of mental and physical co-
morbidities. Therefore, the assignment will be based on developing a health project to reduce the
incidence of obesity in children and develop safe future for the nation.
Obesity in children – why it needs to be addressed?
Overweight and obesity in children is one of the major health concerns in the nation of
Australia. Studies have shown that children who are obese are more likely to develop into obese
adults that affect the quality of the lives of such individuals in many ways. It is seen that such
obese individuals develop increased risk for short term as well as long term health conditions

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that include chronic disorders like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disorders, hypertension and
many others. Such individuals also face several issues in their romantic lives as well (Dyment et
al., 2017). Obese children are not able to participate in many activities and even are highly
bullied by friends and others. These lead to loss of self-esteem and self-confidence and
occurrence of depression. Therefore, in order to develop a nation where the future generation are
both physically and mentally fit, health promotion campaigns need to arrange that would help
such children to overcome obesity and lead better quality lives (Langford et al., 2015).
“The future child” – childhood-obesity-prevention program:
The childhood prevention program would be named as the “the future child” and will be
established with clear goals and objectives. The program will be mainly implemented with the
several lifestyle-based interventions that would follow the Ottawa charter and will be continue
for one year in the community-based manner (Turunen et al., 2017). These will be mainly based
on the management of childhood obesity in every participant by approximately a loss of weight
of about 5 kg within the first four months. The main target population would be comprised of
children of age group 5 to 11 years residing in the city of Casey.
The five important areas of Ottawa Charter:
Development of personal skills:
The healthcare professionals would first be enabling the children as well as their
guardians to prepare themselves with different lifestyle interventions that would help them to
cope up with the chronic illness. This would be facilitated in school, home, work as well as
community settings. The professionals should influence the guardians to adopt good practices
like cooking of fresh vegetables and reject the trend of buying fast foods for children as well as

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preparing processed food. This is mainly because they carry high amount of calories that result in
gain of weight. Fresh foods should be cooked as home cooked have balanced nutrients and
would be helpful for their growth as well (Naidoo & Wills, 2016). An education session should
be arranged in schools as well as communities where both children as well as their parents would
be influenced to adopt physical activities for the children every day, as that would help them to
decrease their weight. These sessions would be providing diet charts as well as physical activity
sessions that would help the children to reduce their weight within the period allocated (Forrest
et al., 2018). Such sessions would be also containing screening sessions by which health status of
children would be measured and accordingly they would be advised about the lifestyle
interventions that need to take. Personal skills are the best way by which both parents and
children will be able to understand the potential risks associated with obesity and thereby take
lifestyle alterations that would enable the family to lead better quality life.
Strengthening the community actions:
This step of the Ottawa Charter mainly focuses on the community development arenas
where proper human as well as material resources are allocated in ways by which self-help and
social support can be achieved by the children and their parents. This step also involves
development of flexible systems by which strengthening of the public participation can be
ensured. this can be mainly achieved by ensuring full and continuous access to information as
well as learning opportunities for health as well as funding support (Kalantrai et al., 2017). The
school authorities should take an active part in this step. The healthcare professionals should try
to engage the schools in educating the children by incorporating chapters on obesity, its side
effects and importance of having balanced meal, functions of each nutrient and many others. The
schools authorities should be also influenced to allow the children everyday for one and half

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hour of physical activities so that besides education, physical activities and exercises also
become part of their routines. Moreover, funding should be allocated to the community clubs
where they would be arranging for different co-curricular activities for the children like
swimming, dances, physical exercises session, martial arts and many others. These would not
only help children to be in constant motion and physical exercises but would also help them to be
mentally feet.
Creating supportive environment:
This is the priority area which is mainly seen to focused on the on decreasing the diseases
burden and thereby address the social issues as well as social injustice. This is mainly handled
and accomplished by the creation of the creative supportive environment where every individuals
of the community feels safe as well as comfortable in taking the right decisions by living in the
environment where they can gave access to better health choices. This step mainly requires
providing the community with the help and support they need regarding the improvement of their
health. The nursing professionals should advocate for the rights of the people of the community
belonging to different social class to get equal access to nutritious food. Proper advocacy for
decreasing the process of fresh fruits and vegetables would help people from all socio economic
classes to avail nutritious low calorgenic food. Process food or fast food is cheaper and therefore
easily affordable (Kabasakal & Kublay, 2017). Therefore, low socioeconomic people may tend
to put them to fetch for their children. Hence, the nursing professionals should advocate on their
behalf to make the price of such food higher and price of nutritious organic food lower so that
they can be availed by all parents for their children. The school canteens should not sell foods
like burger, sweetened drinks and many others so that children do not get access to this.

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Building Health Public Policy:
This step mainly refers to the polices as well as the regulations that are implemented for
the improvement for greater social environment that would help in the development of mental as
well as physically fit individuals. These decisions are made mainly at the levels of the
government as well as organisations for encouraging people to lead healthy lives. These policies
can be seen to contain laws for the schools, organisations and for different other agencies. The
nursing professionals should advocate to the policy makers as well as the ministers of the local
government of the city of Casey to develop policies that would advice the schools as well as the
healthcare centres to develop interventions that would help the students to lose weight through
activities, strategies, plays as well as physical exercises (Igel et al., 2017). Another would be
instructing the broadcasting cannels, the social media channels as well as the different other
agencies to stop the advertising of fast foods and sweetened drinks. These have the capability to
prevent children from getting attracted to such foods and hence remain safe and fine.
Reorienting health services:
The last step would be reorienting health services. This mainly focuses on the funding as
well as the providing of the health services that would mainly help in promoting better health
through early interventions as well as preventions. Here the healthcare professionals of the
primary healthcare centres have a huge responsibility to provide health education to the parents
as well as the children in ways by which they can change their lifestyle. Apart from educating
parents about necessity of nutritious foods as well as physical exercise, they should prevent them
from govern their children calorigenic food (Sallis et al., 2015). They should influence their

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children not to be gazette savvy and spend more time outdoors playing in fields with friends.
These would reduce their scope of gaining calories and increase their chances of breathing the
calories due to exercises and activities.
Conclusion:
From the entire discussion, it becomes clear that with the help of Ottawa charter, it
becomes easier for the nursing professionals to use as guidelines for health promotion and health
education. With the help of this charter, obesity in children in the city of Casey was addressed.
Effective flowing of the strategies would help in developing a physically fit future generation
who can make the nation rapid through their productivity and education.

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