The influence of comprehensive school health on school culture and health behaviors in children

Population health interventions are policies or programs, often outside of the health sector, that shift the distribution of health risk by addressing the underlying social, economic and environmental conditions in which people live, work and play. While poor nutrition and lack of physical activity are the major modifiable risk factors for overweight, obesity and the development of childhood or adult chronic conditions, addressing these individual lifestyle factors in isolation has been shown to result in limited population level health improvement. This suggests that more should to be done to create supportive environments for health promoting behaviours that could mitigate obesity risk. From a population health perspective, schools have been identified as an important intervention setting to improve the future health and well being of children through enhancing learning, providing social support, and establishing healthy lifelong habits. However, the implementation of these initiatives is complex, and there is a paucity of comprehensive research that examines multifactorial policies, programs and school practices for improving the wellbeing and health behaviours of children. Therefore, the purpose of this proposal is to outline a population health intervention research project that seeks to contribute to our understanding of health promoting schools implementation through the an ongoing natural experiment in health promoting schools in a region in Nova Scotia, Canada.