None listed
Conditions
Brief summary
Supporting centre based childcare services to provide healthy food can make an important contribution to promoting health of young children at a critical stage in their development. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of a large scale intervention aiming to increase childcare service implementation of menu nutrition guidelines. The study will recruit 60 long day care services that will be randomised to receive the intervention to support nutrition guideline implementation, or a usual care wait list control group. The intervention will consist of multiple strategies including staff training, executive support, performance feedback, resources and ongoing support. Menu assessments before and after the intervention will be conducted to assess the effectiveness of the initiative in improving compliance with setting nutrition guidelines. We hypothesis that childcare service's implementation of nutrition guidelines will improve as a result of the intervention.
Interventions
A 6 month intervention to improve childcare service implementation of nutrition guidelines will be delivered. The intervention will consist of: cook and service manager training to improve knowledge and skills in regards to the menu planning (service managers and service cooks will be provided with a single one-day menu planning workshop, delivered by experienced dietitians and health promotion staff).; provision of resources including a resource manual, menu planning checklists and recipe ideas
A 6 month intervention to improve childcare service implementation of nutrition guidelines will be delivered. The intervention will consist of: cook and service manager training to improve knowledge and skills in regards to the menu planning (service managers and service cooks will be provided with a single one-day menu planning workshop, delivered by experienced dietitians and health promotion staff).; provision of resources including a resource manual, menu planning checklists and recipe ideas; review of service menus and feedback at one month following the workshop.
Sponsors
Hunter New England Population Health
Study design
Allocation
Randomised controlled trial
Intervention model
Parallel
Primary purpose
Treatment
Masking
Blinded (masking used) (Outcomes Assessor)
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
All
Age
18 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
Yes
Inclusion criteria
Long Day Care Services: For a service to be eligible, it will be located within the Hunter New England region of NSW Australia, provide all meals (at least one main meal and two mid-meals) to children while they are in care, and open for at least 8 hours per day.
Exclusion criteria
Long Day Care Services: Services that do not prepare and provide meals to children onsite or do not have a cook with some responsibility for menu planning will be excluded from the study. Further, services catering exclusively for children requiring specialist care, mobile preschools and family day care centres will also be excluded from the study] A sample of 70 services in the Hunter New England Region (n=111) will be randomly approached to participate in the trial
Outcome results
None listed