Local Wellness Policies - Opportunities for Local Coaches

Posted by admin | wellness coaching, | Monday 2 February 2009 9:17 am

States, counties and cities across the United States are devoting more resources to meeting the critical public health challenges through local wellness policies addressing the escalating public health risks due to rising teenage obesity, diabetes, coronary and heart diseases related healthcare costs.

The 2004 US Congress Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act requires for example that all school districts with a federally-funded school meals program develop and implement a local wellness policy that addresses these public healthcare challenges through nutrition and physical activity components starting from the 2006-2007 school year. Thus all state educational departments require local education agencies to spearhead and implement these local wellness policy programs.

The Pensylvania Education Department thus issued a directive requiring state Schools since 2006 to complete and implement their Local Wellness Policies no later than the first day of the school year. The question on everyone’s mind is - how many schools in each state, county and city have local wellness policies in place and what are local education agencies doing to ensure that they are effectively implemented to achieve the stated health goals.

The obligatory national legal requirement has spurned to creation of civic groups like the National Alliance for nutrition and Activity (NANA) to help develop model local wellness policies checklist, Factsheets and step by step implementation guidelines to assist schools in meeting the requirement. The NANA work group benefits from the membership, participation and contributions of more than 50 top health, physical activity, nutrition, and education professionals from a variety of national and state organizations in the United states.

Schools, counties and cities across the nation are testing programs through events aimed at meeting the implementation requirement of health promotion policy. One such example is that of the Tri-County Council for Southern Maryland and the Charles County Commissioners who launched in 2006 a Bike to Work/Wellness Event to celebrate clean air month targeting both children as well as adult local community audiences.

Other examples include the case of Donna Douglas, best known as Elly May Clampett from “The Beverly Hillbillies,” who presented in August last year an inspirational health and wellness talk to a 400 listener audience at the Abilene Civic Center, urging them not to retire, but to refine — and, if necessary, retread — and to get on with life challenge.

Local wellness policies are by no means limited to health care, health promotion, womens health, mental health, nutrition and fitness activities at schools, colleges, clinics and hospitals. They extend to other public health issues like local community wellness events, local land use policy, local clean air policies and growing local vegetables as shown for the following examples.

California has played a pioneer role in formulating and implementing State and Local Net Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Programs. The Assembly Bill (AB) 1493 requiring the California Air Resources Board (ARB) to develop and adopt the nation’s first greenhouse gas emission standards for automobiles was in fact signed into law on July 22, 2002, by the then Governor Gray Davis. The pioneer local clean air regulations, resisted for long time by the Bush administration have recently been given a boost by the go-ahead to state authorities by Obama administration to develop and coordinate such policies with the federal agencies. California regulations serve as reference model for other states and local authorities following the same route.

GROW LOCAL initiatives from Tacoma in Seattle to Boulder Colorada are bring to the forefront initiatives aimed at increasing food that is produced locally and to support farmers that use natural bio-intensive farming methods. The aim is also to get local communities involved in growing at least a portion of their own food needs as part of the local wellness policy program. The added benefit of such local wellness policies is that is that will help over time to adjust our local food supply system to a more energy-constrained model as transportation, packaging and storage logistics from remote locations is reduced to the bare essentials.

The welcome new development is that these grow local citizen initiatives are attracting more and more women aware of it impact on womens health as well as the fact state and local authority are putting the money where their mouths are through increased public funding and incentives.

Assessment Studies regarding the effectiveness of Local Wellness Policies are conducted across the country by states, counties and cities to test and fine tune the impact of the implementation of the provided checklists and documentation indicate opportunities for local wellness coaches.

The preliminary conclusions show that schools, colleges and universities, hospitals as well as county and local city agencies lack the number of human resources needed to effectively cope on their own with the local wellness challenges. It is therefore recommended that these agencies be authorized to outsource the publicly funded local wellness policy implementation to local wellness coaching partners to help implement the policy goals.

The question is - How ready Is your local coaching practice to cash in on the coaching opportunities arising from the publicly funded Local Wellness Policy initiatives?