Feasibility, acceptability, and potential efficacy of a staff professional development program for the promotion of healthy eating and physical activity in Out of School Hours Care (OSHC) services.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, and potential efficacy of a staff professional development program for the promotion of healthy eating and physical activity in Out of School Hours Care (OSHC) services. The intervention involves a staff professional development program aimed at educating and upskilling OSHC staff in the promotion of healthy eating and physical activity in their service. Staff will attend one face-to-face three-hour professional development session run by investigators on this study. The session will be held at a location mutually accessible to services participating in the intervention. If required, two professional development sessions will be held in different locations to assist with attendance. The session will involve nutrition and physical activity education, and practical activities to teach skills around offering physical activity opportunities. A combination of PowerPoint presentation, worksheets having them create action plans, group discussion, role play and physical activity games will be used in the training. Staff will be encouraged to implement lessons learned into their service practice by completing their action plan and any necessary outputs from this (e.g. changing menus, rewriting nutrition policies, creating physical activity schedules etc.). Each service will develop their own action plan in the training, and set goals they believe are achievable over the following 4 weeks. The intervention will utilise the recently developed Eat Smart Play Smart (ESPS) mobile phone App as a resource for participants and content. The ESPS App was developed by investigators on this project and consists of evidence-based healthy eating and physical activity information for OSHC staff. Participants will be encouraged to use the ESPS app at their own discretion. After attending the professional development session, participants will implement the training for four weeks and receive ongoing curriculum support during this period. This ongoing support will involve a once weekly check-in phone call with the service director, and once weekly text messages/emails with service staff. The content of these text messages/emails will reinforce key learning from the professional development and provide links to additional resources. Ongoing support will also be catered to specific goals the service identified in their action plan. A photo of their action plan will be taken during the training and used for this purpose. Implementation of the lessons learned in the training will be monitored through the weekly phone calls with service directors, where they will be asked about how well they are addressing their action plan. Baseline/follow up data collection methods will also help reveal changes they implemented to service structure/practice.