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

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

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HEALTH PROMOTION
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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HEALTH PROMOTION
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