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Despite evidence suggesting regular exercise (i.e. structured, repetitive and purposeful physical activity) attenuates cardiac patients’ decline in health, our understanding of factors affecting long-term exercise participation among this patient cohort is limited. This problem is pertinent, given that less than half of cardiac patients adhere to exercise following discharge from formal exercise-based rehabilitation programmes. In this study, we explored factors influencing exercise participation after an outpatient cardiac rehabilitation programme.
Childhood is a critical period for the development of movement behaviours such as physical activity, sleep and sedentary behaviour. The PLAYCE Cohort was established to investigate how movement behaviours change over early to middle childhood, across key behaviour settings and relationships with health and development. An overview of the PLAYCE cohort, summary of key findings to date, and future research opportunities are presented.
High levels of sedentary behaviour are associated with poor child health outcomes such as obesity. Early childhood education and care (ECEC) services are a key intervention setting. Most ECEC policy-based interventions focus on children's nutrition and physical activity with few aimed at children's sedentary behaviour.
Physical activity is crucial for young children's health and development. Many young children do not meet the recommended 3 hours of daily physical activity, including 60 min of energetic play. Early childhood education and care (ECEC/childcare) is a key setting to intervene to improve children's physical activity. The Play Active programme is a scalable evidence-informed ECEC-specific physical activity policy intervention with implementation support strategies to improve educators' physical activity-related practices.
Physical activity improves physical and psychosocial outcomes in healthy children and in children with a range of chronic health conditions. Unfortunately, children with chronic health conditions have lower levels of physical activity compared to their healthy peers due to multiple restrictions in physical activities and therefore tend to have lower levels of physical activity compared with their peers. This paper describes the protocol for Move to Improve, a pragmatic trial of an individualised physical activity intervention for children with chronic health conditions.
There is an urgent need for scalable interventions to promote physical activity in early childhood. An early childhood education and care physical activity policy intervention with implementation support strategies (Play Active) has been proposed for scale-up in Australia.
Robust evaluation is critical for understanding and enhancing the impact of health promotion initiatives. However, many community-based organisations face challenges in planning and conducting evaluation due to limitations in knowledge, resources, and the applicability of existing evaluation frameworks. The Healthway Evaluation Framework, and its accompanying practical Measurement Toolkit, was designed to support evaluation planning, implementation, and reporting across diverse health promotion programs and settings.
Exercise for people with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) is important for their health and wellbeing and can provide opportunities for community participation. However, they may find it difficult to participate in some contexts, such as community gyms because social and environmental barriers in these settings may compound difficulties caused by physical impairments or intellectual disability.
Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) experience difficulties performing fundamental movement skills, resulting in reduced physical activity (PA). Given low PA can impact mental and physical health, improving PA in DCD appears imperative. This study investigates the feasibility of a Facebook delivered, parent mediated, PA intervention for children with DCD.
Child poverty remains a major global concern and a child's experience of deprivation is heavily shaped by where they live and the stability of their local neighbourhood. This study examines frequencies and patterns of residential mobility in children and young people at a population level using novel geospatial techniques to assess how often their physical environment changes and to identify geographical variations in social mobility.