Team 1 (Courtney Beed, Ruth Rayikanti, Beena Patel, Blavir Sukhorukov and Carol Shu)
DHC Executive Summary
5/23/07
The Nutrition Education Project, headed by Team One, involved conducting a needs assessment in conjunction with the Yolo County Health Department in order to develop a directory of existing nutrition education programs in the cities of Davis, Winters, Woodland and West Sacramento. Our vision was to promote health education and prevention, with our core purposes being to understand deficiencies in health care to help underserved communities, to raise awareness about health services among the community, and to develop recommendations based on researched data.
Our group consisted of students who were highly passionate about the health field and sought to bring change into this area. Over the course of the year, our ideas shifted from doing a needs assessment for a local clinic to starting an annual health faire that promoted dental awareness in Woodland. Finally, we decided to pursue the issue of nutrition in local cities in Yolo County. Maryfrances Collins is the health program coordinator for the Yolo County Health Department. She is well connected with the community and with the department in charge of installing new nutrition programs in Yolo county public schools and communities. After meeting her and under her sponsorship, our enthusiasm for exploring key relationships between nutrition education programs, schools, supermarkets and subsidized housing for major cities in Yolo County was further strengthened.
In today’s society, obesity is a very hot topic due to the significant overweight population in the United States. According to a recent study, researchers found that the percentage of children overweight in Yolo County is higher than the national goal of 5%[1]. For this reason, we contacted public and private elementary, middle and high schools in each Yolo County city to see what services were available for educating students about eating healthy. We obtained this information through a survey of five questions administered by e-mail and phone and sent to the schools’ principals and/or secretaries. The survey responses varied per city and unfortunately, we were not able to hear back from many schools. For the city of Davis, some schools had nutrition programs, whereas other had programs geared specifically towards seventh and eighth graders. Winters, one of the smaller cities in the county, did not have any city-based nutrition programs available to any age group. West Sacramento’s schools had no programs for their students, whereas a couple of Woodland’s schools had some programs available. Even though certain schools did not have their own independent programs for nutrition, cities like Davis, Woodland and West Sacramento had their own nutrition education programs or had access to countywide health education programs.
We used city maps to understand the proximity of schools to fast food restaurants and subsidized housing locations to full service supermarkets. Our research shows that Woodland is the ideal city with schools isolated from fast food places and supermarkets within walking distance to subsidized housing complexes. The city of Davis shared similar results. While fast food restaurants did not surround schools in the city of Winters, there were only a few supermarkets available to its residents. West Sacramento proved to be the most problematic city in that quite a few schools and subsidized housing complexes were within walking distances to fast food places, but were very far from supermarkets.
Hence, for this area, we recommend healthier food stores near the subsidized housing areas supplemented with nutrition education programs. Since Winters lacked programs all together, education about nutrition for middle and high school students needs to be implemented in order to promote healthy eating styles. Some ways the city can accomplish this goal include providing nutrition workshops and pamphlets to residents. The city also has a fairly large Latino population; therefore there needs to be more nutrition programs that are culturally sensitive to serve this specific population. As the “ideal city,” Woodland can make recommendations to its neighboring cities by educating residents residing in subsidized housing areas about available programs, as well as provide attention to elementary schools. The city of Davis is also in need of nutrition education on the middle school and high school levels as well as for the students’ parents.
Despites having some challenging moments, our group worked diligently to compile a directory that we hope will be utilized by the Yolo County Nutrition Department. During our final presentation, we presented this directory, containing population information, nutrition programs, survey responses from the various schools, and maps for each city in Yolo County. We hope to have opened the door that will bring about much needed change in our researched cities. Furthermore, due to the immense amount of research that can still be done pertaining to this issue, our project can be expanded and would be a great fourth year project for future DHC students.
[1] Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health Community Needs Assessment. 2004. County of Yolo Health Department. www.yolocounty.org.