Selecting a Planning Model for Childhood Obesity

Obesity

A brief explanation of the public health need you identified.

Childhood obesity is an increasingly prevalent problem in our homes, schools and in the United States as a whole. With obesity comes a host of health risks including heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and a significantly shorter lifespan. This is why early intervention in critical.

Describe the population whom you plan to target for your public health program and explain why.

Early intervention should take the form of addressing obesity in your elementary school aged children. It is at this age that health behaviors become habit-forming and more difficult to break. Additionally, because it appears that younger people are ever more susceptible to obesity, it is critical to take corrective action now.

Describe potential sources of funding.

Funding will largely be elicited through the combined support of government grant programs aimed at reducing childhood obesity and private companies such as health insurers and area health research universities with a vested interest in improving the public health through charitable contribution.

Describe the partners you might mobilize and explain why.

The approach to this program must be collaborative and must be achieved through a high level of interagency cooperation. This approach is underscored by one of the core imperatives of the CDC's (2011) Healthy People 2020 initiative. According to the CDC, "because these objectives are national, not solely Federal, their achievement is dependent in part on the ability of health agencies at all levels of the government and on non-governmental organizations to assess objective progress." (CDC, p. 1)

This denotes a degree of resource support from the federal government, which must be a partner insofar as helping to set meaningful benchmarks for evaluating the intervention program's success. Additionally, state and local health agencies public and private must be enlisted as outlets for the distribution of information. And most critically, schools and parents must be engaged on a united friend in the promotion of healthy lifestyles aimed at reducing the spread of obesity and its related health risks.

Describe the planning model you would use for your public health program and explain why this model is an appropriate match.

The Health Communication Model is ideal for the demographic and the targeted health issue. This is selected for a number of reasons, critical among them the fact that the population in question is in an especially formative stage. This means that negative health beliefs may not be too deeply embedded. This is the appropriate time to implement a program that would intervene with negative health beliefs relating to diet and exercise through education-based communication.