Establishing a Community Network of Prevention and Health Promotion for Children from the Ages of 3 to 10 and Their Families

Introduction: This project (PNO), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, aims to promote the physical and psychological well-being and social inclusion of children between 3 and 10 years and their families in the Ortenau district. Over the four year life span of the project, a community network will be established in a two-track process: Firstly, local prevention agents are building networks with stakeholders from the prevention and health promotion field, organize roundtables to create a prevention strategy for the whole region, and assess local needs. On a regional level, a prevention conference is being held regularly to identify needs and gaps in the community support structure. Also a prevention report for the whole region will be generated as a base for how deal with needs and how to take action in an efficient way. Secondly, educational institutions are playing a vital role when gaining access to children and their families. Thus the project will offer 18 month long organizational development processes with specially trained coaches to 25 ECEC institutions and 25 primary schools. The process is based on a curriculum of prevention and health promotion which is adapted to the specific needs of the institutions. There are additional possibilities to request training for professionals in the field of prevention and health promotion.

Method: The project is accompanied by an extensive research design to evaluate the outcomes of different project components such as interview data from community prevention agents, interviews and network analysis with families at risk on their support structures, data on community network development and monitoring, as well as data from ECEC institutions and primary schools. The latter features a waiting-list control group evaluation in ECEC institutions and primary schools with a mixed methods design using questionnaires and interviews with pedagogues, teachers, parents and children.

Results: The project started in November 2014, by the time of the annual meeting descriptive t₀ data from the ECEC institution samples will be presented, as well as data from the first project phase will be presented, such as qualitative interviews with the prevention agents as well as quantitative data from the questionnaire on the community needs assessment which serves as the base for the prevention report.

Conclusion: In supporting this project, the Federal Ministry aims to gain insight into efficient components of community prevention and health promotion networks as it is implemented and evaluated. The district will serve as a model region, so that successful components can be transferred in other regions throughout Germany. Accordingly, the transferability to other regions is of high interest in this project.