Promoting Heath Among Military Families: 5210 Healthy Military Children

Introduction: Disseminating evidence-informed health promotion strategies to parents has the potential to improve health and decrease the prevalence of obesity among children. The 5210 Healthy Military Children campaign (HMC) is designed to spread a consistent health message throughout Military communities. The campaign emphasizes “5” + fruits and vegetables, “2” or fewer hours of recreational screen time, “1” + hours of moderate-vigorous physical activity, and “0” sweetened drinks.

Methods: An effectiveness-implementation Hybrid Type 3 design (Curran et al., 2012) study was conducted among six Military installations, where 15 venues (e.g., child development centers and commissaries) at each site were targeted by the 5210 HMC campaign using venue-specific toolkits, posters, social media messaging, and flyers. The Point of Contact (POC) at each installation was trained on content and campaign implementation strategies via a 7-module online training. Phone interviews were conducted with POCs over the course of the 12-month campaign to collect implementation data (Proctor et al., 2011). Opt-in text based surveys were used to evaluate the impact of the campaign on awareness, knowledge, and health behaviors at 0, 4, 8, and 12 months.

Results:  Survey participants were 115 adults, with the majority 25-40 years (61%), female (71%), and with children (60%). Most people opted in to participate at a medical center (29%) or via social media (23%). At baseline, 78% of participants were not aware of the 5210 message. Most participants indicated that they sometimes ate 5+ fruits/vegetables daily (61%), sometimes spent more than 2 hours a day watching television, playing video games, or surfing the web (42%), always spent 1 + hours engaging in daily physical activity (39%), and rarely drank sweetened beverages daily (40%). Parental reports of their children’s behaviors mirrored those of their own behaviors. While attrition in the study declined over the 12-month period, for those remaining at 12 months, awareness and knowledge of the 5210 message increased (trending toward significance), with no significant change in behavior.

Conclusions: Dissemination and implementation research seeks to translate knowledge into practice. Improving the quality and consistency of health promotion messaging may improve family and child health outcomes. This pilot study produced a wide array of lessons learned and next steps in implementing and evaluating an evidence-informed health promotion campaign in a Military context.