In the health care organizations, decision makers face challenges in the use of guidelines, acquiring knowledge on quality, and preferences in which recommendations are made although they are not clear. The stakeholders within healthcare organizations such as patients, policymakers, and the general public make informed decisions based on the best evidence of research. Childhood obesity is one of the issues that affect the lives of young children and their future capability to take part in the community activities. It would be important to formulate effective strategies of communication to reduce the risks of life threatening problems that might affect young adults. The main objective would be to change the rising trend for the obesity epidemic and develop policies to assist children in being more active and eat healthy diets.
Health records in the healthcare organizations indicate that more than 23 million children in the United States are obese and are most likely to fail to attend school and might develop other health complications. Health experts argue that if the trends of obesity epidemic continue rising, it might result in scenarios of young generations succumbing to death (Dietz et.al, 2015). It is evident that social and physical environments have a great influence on health conditions for the young generations. Similarly, how ways of living for the young generations have a significant impact on the level of health. Communities need to provide healthy foods to the children and safe environment of play to promote a healthy population.
In most cases, guidelines are considered as an efficient way of presenting a recommendation to the decision makers in the healthcare setting. However, a number of factors come into play to influence the making of decisions and to assess adverse effects and benefits of a therapeutic intervention. The factors include quality of evidence, values of patients, preferences and the policy makers. Developers of guidelines are inconsistent in the way that rate evidence quality and value strength of recommendations (Harris et.al, 2014). Consequently, users of guidelines experience difficulties in developing an understanding of messages in the guidelines and limits to their trustworthiness. Effective communication strategies can, therefore, assist in bridging the gap that exists in clinical research and practices in the healthcare setting.
In the efforts of promoting health levels among children, stakeholders need to amend the public policies to make all member of the community healthier. The most appropriate changes would be to ensure that children eat healthy foods and less junk food that might lead to cases of being overweight. In addition, it would be important to promote policies that result in an increase in physical activities in both schools and community settings (Kurtzman &Greene, 2016). Other recommendations would be minimizing the time that young children spend on the television. In addition, it would be of essential purpose to increase the availability of healthy foods at the community level in, which the government can work in collaboration with the farmer to promote the sustainable supply of foods in the markets. Furthermore, an improvement of safe places for children to play can create opportunities to take part in exercises that can promote health.
It would be important to establish and evaluate to the targeted communication on the recommendations that are based on research to the stakeholders who make a decision on what happens in the healthcare setting. In addition, it would be important to develop and examine strategies to communicate efficiently and support evidence based recommendations about tests on diagnosis to the policy makers and patients (Karnik & Kanekar, 2015). In addressing strategies on prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation, it would be important to develop recommendation strategies on diagnostic tests. The strategy is targeted at both healthcare professionals and policies on healthcare systems. Furthermore, it would be important to develop a communication tool kit to prepare and convey relevant information based on evidence based recommendations.
Organizations have developed empirical support for a wide range of strategies of communication and how evidence on research can be presented to users to formulate the use of information contained in guidelines. The project will involve a good collaboration between policy makers, managers, and the general public. Each of the developed strategies on communication will be based on the needs of each of the stakeholders in developing effective strategies (Ogden et.al, 2014). Guidelines on clinical practices have become increasingly popular such as statements meant to informed care for patients and an examination of the harms and benefits of options for alternative care.
Through the work, healthcare practitioners will gather user feedback from different persons through the use of user testing, feedback from stakeholders such as the individuals who author guidelines. Afterward, analysis on the feedback will be analyzed to define problem areas and revise strategies to brainstorm workshops. In addition, the perceptions of the users will be analyzed in a variety of guidelines and the preferences in regard to content and presentation. Afterward, there will be an evaluation of randomized trials tailored to the different groups of stakeholders and for interventions such as health systems, treatment, and diagnosis. The channels of communication will depend on the policy makers to be reached such as the use of mass media and face to face communication.
In conclusion, it is important to find comprehensive solutions to childhood obesity as a strategy to promote the health levels for children. Effective communication between policy makers and other stakeholders such as patients and health practitioners is one of the strategies to raise the levels of health among children. In addition, provision of knowledge and enough resources in the healthcare settings. The government should, therefore, support prevention policies and interventions meant to improve the health levels among children.
- Dietz, W. H., Baur, L. A., Hall, K., Puhl, R. M., Taveras, E. M., Uauy, R., & Kopelman, P. (2015). Management of obesity: improvement of health-care training and systems for prevention and care. The Lancet, 385(9986), 2521-2533.
- Harris, J. K., Moreland-Russell, S., Tabak, R. G., Ruhr, L. R., & Maier, R. C. (2014). Communication about childhood obesity on Twitter. American journal of public health, 104(7), e62-e69.
- Karnik, S., & Kanekar, A. (2015). Childhood obesity: a global public health crisis. Int J Prev Med, 2012. 3 (1), 1-7.
- Kurtzman, E. T., & Greene, J. (2016). Effective presentation of health care performance information for consumer decision making: A systematic review. Patient education and counseling, 99(1), 36-43.
- Ogden, C. L., Carroll, M. D., Kit, B. K., & Flegal, K. M. (2014). Prevalence of childhood and adult obesity in the United States, 2011-2012. Jama, 311(8), 806-814.
