Leadership Paper on Childhood Obesity

I chose to do my paper on childhood obesity and what local governments are doing about it. This particular topic has been a concern of mine for sometime now. I have been noticing that we are seeing more obese children than ever before.

I learned some surprising facts through my research because I was under the impression that no one was really doing much about childhood obesity. I have heard of a few schools trying to change lunch programs or get sugar and candy out of school vending machines but it did not seem as thought that was doing much.

I have learned through several articles that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) created a committee for childhood obesity prevention. This committee came about due to some government officials that also thought no one was targeting this growing dilema.

The committee was created with the focus on identifying practices that would serve as the basis for a set of recommendations for local governments to consider in planning, implementing and refining obestiy efforts for children in their local areas.

The target age group was 12 - 19 year olds and the approach to action was preventing childhood obesity is the first action to healthier adults through healthier environments, providing better health care, involvement and collaboration with local entities, and implementation of school programs.

It was stated in the report (IOM, 2009) that local governments were the first place to start because they have the means to make policy changes through law to focus on resoures and implement plans to start childhood prevention programs. Local governments also have provisions for evaluating the effectiveness of the programs.

The committee recommended that raising awareness of healthy eating and diet, physical activity goals, and decreasing sedentary behavior were just a few places to start with educating the public.

I really felt like the schools were an important place to start with this education with children and according to (Moyers, et al, 2005) school nurse thought overall this was a really good idea but were very discouraged because they were not getting support from parents or counseling within the schools.

As a nurse leader I still think the schools would be a good place to start with the childhood prevention programs. I think that teams need to be formed with parents, educators, administrators, school nurses, school dietary staff and any other person interested in seeing children growup healthy and happy.

I believe that if we target childhood obesity now, we as nurses will see less cardiovascular, hypertension and diabetes in the future and we will see an all around heathier world full of people.