Miami-Dade County Department of Park: Program Evaluation Planning

Words: 1189 Pages: 4

Table of Contents

Assignment 1
Assignment 2
Response to a Peer’s Post
References

Assignment 1

Item	Response (three to five sentences per item)
Purpose: Explain the purpose of the evaluation.	Parks Rx 4Health program was selected for preparing an evaluation of its goals, results, opportunities, and failures. The identified program was developed by the Miami Dade County Department of Park to provide children with accessible places for physical activity (Messiah et al., 2016). The pivotal purpose of the evaluation is to access how the program changed the rates of childhood obesity in Miami Dade County. The integrated care of health professionals, families, and community as a whole should be targeted.
Users: Identify the persons who will receive the evaluation data.	The data that will be obtained as a result of the evaluation will be beneficial for policymakers, health care providers, and parents. The point is to integrate the efforts of the mentioned stakeholders in initiating obesity-prevention activities. The data may be published online on academic sources so that other states and counties may adopt this experience.
Uses: Explain the ways the information from the evaluation will be applied.	Community nurses may apply the received data to encourage children with overweight and obesity visit the parks. In addition, pediatricians will better understand how physical activity affects their patients and how to explain its role to children. The findings may also be important for adjusting weak points of the program and making much more effective in the future (Messiah et al., 2016). The positive results are likely to attract more funding to the project, which will lead to the creation of more parks and equipment provision.
Questions: Provide the boundaries by identifying what aspects of the program will be evaluated.	The first aspect to be evaluated is children’s measurable data to compare it with initial indicators, including body mass index, blood pressure, nutrition habits, and time spent in parks. The second aspect is children’s attitudes towards the program, which will show whether they found it engaging and effective or not. In combination, these two aspects will create a comprehensive understanding of obesity health problem.
Methods: Describe the research methods you will use.	A set of research methods is expected to be utilized to ensure reliability and accuracy of findings. Face-to-face interviews with the program participants will be conducted to reveal their thoughts, experiences, and emotions regarding their time spent in parks. Along with the above qualitative method, statistical calculations will be performed by means of SPSS or ANOVA software. After that, the received data will be analyzed in combination, and it is expected that the mixed method research will help in understanding the impact of the program.
Agreements: Describe the evaluation procedures and any negotiations or considerations among those who will execute the evaluation.	To make sure that all participants of the evaluation will properly comprehend their role, the procedures are to be documented, including primary data collection, monitoring, ultimate data gathering, analysis, and presentation of results. Consistent with the ideas expressed by the article of Messiah et al. (2016), the community nurses, pediatricians, parents, and volunteers will be given similar instructions an explained how they will cooperate and negotiate. It will also be stated that ethical considerations are important, and any act should be agreed with parents of a child who will participate voluntarily.

Table 1. Program Evaluation.

Assignment 2

Google Scholar search revealed approximately 17000 journal articles for such keywords as planning, evaluation, program, and child obesity. The majority of them are scholarly articles that explore and assess programs that were prepared to address the identified health issue. Public Health Nutrition, Childhood Obesity, World Journal of Clinical Pediatrics, and so on publish articles on the given topic. For example, “Childhood Obesity Research Demonstration Project: Cross-Site Evaluation Methods” by O’Connor et al. (2015) and “Evaluation Overview for the Massachusetts Childhood Obesity Research Demonstration (MA-CORD) Project” by Davison et al. (2015) may be noted. The journal articles differ in the way they address the problem, methods of research, sampling strategies, and target population. However, only the first 2-3 pages of the search may be considered as fitting the research topic since the rest of them include one or several keywords and does not address the problem being discovered. Of the sources that were found, five were dissertations, the ideas of which provided the recent insights regarding child obesity in the United States and worldwide.

Some questions still exist due to a range of factors that serve as obstacles. For example, it is unclear how to overcome economic, demographic, and social barriers to ensuring proper access to healthy foods and healthcare services. Another problem is associated with the fact that many parents unware of a significant negative impact of obesity on the children’s lives. Therefore, there is an urgent need to create programs that will aim at increasing awareness among parents based on their education. For instance, official websites and short brochures may be prepared to engage parents and their children to practice healthier lifestyles. Another trend is reflected by the study of van Nassau, Singh, van Mechelen, Brug, and Chinapaw (2015), who discuss how school-based obesity programs and pose the following question: “did schools with a higher degree of implementation show more effects?” (p. 1532). This question should be answered to understand why some of the programs proved to be ineffective, and others succeeded. The translation of theoretical statements into the practice is also a concern described in the academic literature as one of the most critical issues in the field.

Response to a Peer’s Post

While the importance of education of patients with diabetes is discussed in many sources, the question of how to organize their training remains open. One of the potential solutions is e-learning that implies that patients access valuable resources and communicate with their caregivers via the Internet (Pereira, Phillips, Johnson, & Vorderstrasse, 2015). The main objectives of educating patients with diabetes are the use of non-pharmacological treatments such as proper nutrition, adapted physical activity, the identification of individual therapeutic goals, self-monitoring of metabolism, and the prevention of chronic complications. According to Pereira et al. (2015), e-learning promotes easier access to education and allows patients to follow their own pace, thus ensuring convenience and effectiveness of managing their disease. The results of this study demonstrate the high efficiency of training on clinical, metabolic parameters, indicators of behavior associated with the disease, and a range of other diabetes-associated issues.

The evidence also convincingly confirms the need for the intensive observation of patients with diabetes, for whom training support is provided (Pereira et al., 2015). Following a therapeutic regimen for diabetes may be the most difficult task for a patient. A number of control and therapeutic measures are technically difficult (insulin therapy or self-control of glycemia), and others affect lifestyles (Rani Pal, 2014). At the same time, the more consciously and productively a patient participates in education, the higher the effectiveness of the latter in relation to the compensation of metabolic processes, the prevention of complications, and the overall quality of life. Even though the positive role of diabetes e-learning is evident, it is still unclear what are cost-benefit relations and how the suggested intervention may affect patients in a long-term period.

References

Davison, K. K., Falbe, J., Taveras, E. M., Gortmaker, S., Kulldorff, M., Perkins, M.,… Kwass, J. A. (2015). Evaluation overview for the Massachusetts childhood obesity research demonstration (MA-CORD) project. Childhood Obesity, 11(1), 23-36.

Messiah, S. E., Jiang, S., Kardys, J., Hansen, E., Nardi, M., & Forster, L. (2016). Reducing childhood obesity through coordinated care: Development of a park prescription program. World Journal of Clinical Pediatrics, 5(3), 234-243.

O’Connor, D. P., Lee, R. E., Mehta, P., Thompson, D., Bhargava, A., Carlson, C.,… Rifai, H. (2015). Childhood obesity research demonstration project: Cross-site evaluation methods. Childhood Obesity, 11(1), 92-103.

Pereira, K., Phillips, B., Johnson, C., & Vorderstrasse, A. (2015). Internet delivered diabetes self-management education: A review. Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics, 17(1), 55-63.

Rani Pal, B. (2014). Social media for diabetes health education-inclusive or exclusive? Current Diabetes Reviews, 10(5), 284-290.

van Nassau, F., Singh, A. S., van Mechelen, W., Brug, J., & Chinapaw, M. J. (2015). Implementation evaluation of school-based obesity prevention programmes in youth; How, what and why? Public Health Nutrition, 18(9), 1531-1534.