Recipe For life: Nutrition in Early Years Seminar Report

A Recipe for Life Nutrition in Early Years Evaluation Summary Report Rebecca Winslade-Rees Public Health Network Cymru Coordinator March 2019

Introduction Public Health Network Cymru based within Public Health Wales provides a range of support to practitioners and researchers across all sectors that influence any aspect of public health and health improvement in Wales. Amongst the services they provide is a seminar series that seeks to promote best practice based on existing and emerging evidence. The series covers a diverse range of topics and recent examples have included topics such as Mental Health in the Workplace: Employing Best Practice and Older People and Isolation. The topics are determined by the network members who vote on a list of approximately 12 topics that are circulated annually and Nutrition in Early Years was voted for by members.

The seminar took place on Wednesday 6th February 2019 at Cardiff Metropolitan University and was chaired by Lucy O’Loughlin, Consultant within Public Health Wales.

The first presentation was by the chair Lucy O’Loughlin who introduced the recent consultation launch from Welsh Government of Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales which aims to develop a plan to prevent and reduce obesity in Wales. The next presentation by Judith John from the Healthy and Active Branch within Welsh Government gave an overview of the recently published ‘Food and Nutrition in Childcare Settings – Best Practice Guidance (2018)’.

Dr Helen Crawley, Director of the First Steps Nutrition Trust Charity gave a thought provoking presentation; ‘Infant and young child nutrition: what needs to change?’ that looked at the current state of infant nutrition in the UK and addressed a need for a cultural shift that includes strong guidance to promote positive change for the long term health and wellbeing of children. Sarah Andrews, Head of Programme – Healthy Settings from Public Health Wales presented on the Healthy and Sustainable Preschool Scheme for Wales. This also included a presentation by Sarah Power, Healthy Schools/Preschools Officer from Powys Local Public Health Team showcasing a best practice example programme Bach a Lach, which offers practical support and resources to increase the uptake of preschools to the scheme. The final presentation of the morning was from Andrea Basu, Network Lead for Public Health Dietetics from Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board. The presentation showcased another example of best practice; Boliau Bach/Tiny Tums. This award scheme, developed and managed by Public Health Dietitians aims to recognise and reward early childcare settings for achieving best practice in their food and drink provision for 1-4 year olds.

The presentations were followed by three workshops: The First 1000 Days of Life: the importance of good nutrition This workshop highlighted that the first 1000 days of life start with a women’s pregnancy through to the child’s second birthday which offers a unique opportunity to set foundations for optimal growth and lifelong health.

Furthermore that nutrition in the early years plays a vital role in neurodevelopment; allergy prevention; obesity prevention and establishing good eating habits for life. This workshop enabled science and evidence to be translated into practical ways to support families to eat well. Nutrition initiatives designed and delivered by Public Health Dietitians in Wales and how these can support families and practitioners on the ground was also discussed.

Optimising Family income – supporting families to access food schemes This workshop provided a background to the work of Food Sense Wales in helping to support families’ access good food. The workshop covered some broad context around initiatives such as Food Cardiff, Peas Please and Food Power as well as exploring some specific examples of the benefits and schemes which are often under subscribed e.g. the Healthy Start scheme. In particular this workshop asked – “What is your/your organisations role in ensuring families access the help available to them?”

10 Steps to a Healthy Weight Programme: what is a healthy weight?

This workshop explored what a healthy weight looks like, the difficulties that some may have recognising an unhealthy weight and ideas to support parents identifying and addressing unhealthy weights. This workshop also highlighted the new Recognition campaign and some specific steps within the programme.

Individual presentations are available by contacting publichealth.network@wales.nhs.uk or can be accessed on the Public Health Network Cymru website.

Evaluation 62 people registered for the seminar and 54 attended on the day. The seminar was also live streamed via Twitter, with 65 people viewing part of the morning session. Unfortunately due to technical difficulties the live stream was stopped mid-morning.

An evaluation form was given to all delegates at the end of the event and 22 forms were returned.

Quantitative Results The first question asks delegates whether or not they were members of Public Health Network Cymru. The majority of people (63.3%) who attended were members of the Network. 31.8% of attendees were non-members of the Network and 4% did not answer the question. In the week following the seminar the Network had 21 new member registrations many of which could be seen as a direct result from attendees promoting the Network in their areas.

Another question on the evaluation form asks delegates to rank from 1 to 5, (where 1 is not at all useful and 5 is very useful) “how useful did you find the seminar?�. As can be seen the majority of people (72.2%) answered 5 to this question with 18% (4 people) provided the answer of 4 and 9% (2 people) did not answer the question.

Qualitative Results Further questions on the evaluation form looked for a qualitative response which is detailed below.

What was your main motivation for attending this event?

The majority of delegates attended the seminar to find out more about the topic and to update themselves with recent research and good practice. Networking was also an important factor for a number of the delegates.

“Update on infant nutrition, what new things are happening across Wales” “As a student nutritionist to gain some information on initiatives in Wales and to network and chat with people involved in Public Health Nutrition” “To keep up to date with developments around healthy nutrition in preschool years” “New research and education, update my knowledge” Was there anything that was of notable interest?

Many delegates mentioned the presentations and in particular the presentation from Dr Helen Crawley, Director of the First Steps Nutrition Trust.

“Helen Crawley was fantastic! Wish she would have had more time on the agenda” “Really inspiring to hear Helen Crawley speak about importance of cultural shift in breastfeeding and early life nutrition” “All topics provided new learning and generated interesting discussion” The workshops were also mentioned a number of times in the evaluation forms as being interesting and informative.

“1000 Days workshop was thought provoking and raised awareness” “I found it all extremely interesting specifically the 2 workshops” “Discussion around veg intake and initiatives to increase this” “The speakers were really informative and workshops were great” How do you plan to utilise the learning gained at this event?

A number of delegates said that they would share the information with colleagues and incorporate information gained into their working practice.

“Continue to promote understanding of importance of good nutrition in the early years and consistent evidence based nutrition messages” “Ensure points raised are covered in local plan” “Incorporate new knowledge into work going forward” “Change my approach when working with preschool settings. Use factual info more often” “Taking all the info back to the team and how we can use it in our roles”

What seminar / conference topics would you like to see delivered in the future?

Many of the topics that delegates said they would like to see covered in future events were linked closely to the topic area of this seminar and specifically nutrition across other stages of life.

“More on how nutrition is fitting in with the wider public health agenda. Each age/stage pregnancy - teens - nutritional priorities” “Nutrition through other aspects of life course” “Children weight management support” “Influence of marketing of food manufacturers/companies” “Obesity - childhood/MECC” Other comments Delegates had an opportunity to provide any further comments they had about the event, which the majority were very positive. One negative comment was in relation to the presentation slides which were not bilingual apart from one. The Network will take this on board for future events. Delegates also experienced difficulties parking at the venue. The Network acknowledged these and gave feedback to the venue for future improvements.

“Excellent venue and facilitation, however parking arrangements are a huge barrier” “Really enjoyed all the topics discussed and good to network and meet other professionals as a newly qualified health visitor” “Thank you for providing a free event it’s impossible to get study leave funding via health board” “Very approachable group of people, everyone seemed valued in their opinions” “Really enjoyed all the topics discussed and good to network and meet other professionals as a newly qualified health visitor” “Very well organised, great venue” One word Participants were asked to give one word to sum up how they felt about the event. These words have been inputted into Wordle (www.wordle.net). Wordle generates word diagrams that give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the text. From this you can clearly see that excellent and informed were stated most frequently.

Mentimeter Mentimeter is an easy to use web based presentation tool. It is a secure platform that can be used with different sized audiences to make presentations more interactive.

We took the opportunity to use Mentimeter to interact with delegates and find out their views on the current situation.

Participation was very good by delegates and a total of 26 delegates took part. The results are as follows:

On a scale of 1 to 5 how much positive influence do you feel childcare settings can have on children’s eating habits?

Further information Further information and a short video of the day is available on the Public Health Network Cymru website or by contacting publichealth.network@wales.nhs.uk