Suggested Uses
Training Tool | Facilitated Group Discussions
Training Tool
The video Beyond Nutrition Counseling: Reframing the Battle Against Obesity, developed by Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center through a research collaboration between Cincinnati Children's and the Kentucky WIC Program, can be used as a training tool either by itself or in combination with a facilitated group discussion.
The primary target audience is the WIC health professional and not the WIC client. Those lacking public nutrition experience such as undergraduate nutrition students, dietetic interns and new employees might especially benefit from viewing the video.
Viewing the video is intended to increase the awareness of health professionals about the barriers in WIC to addressing the problem of childhood obesity. Combining the video with a facilitated group discussion, a technique that elicits discussion about topics in the video, will assist health professionals in identifying possible solutions to the barriers. The facilitated group discussion may be used to assist state or local WIC agencies in trying to identify, from their own staff, techniques for improving nutrition counseling on childhood obesity.
The goals of the video and facilitated group discussion are:
- To increase awareness of how WIC families perceive the problem of childhood obesity and how the WIC Program currently counsels families on this problem.
- To increase awareness of the challenges faced by WIC families, particularly in the area of child-rearing or parenting, as they try to prevent or manage obesity in their children.
- To provide specific advice on how to best address the issue of childhood obesity during WIC counseling sessions.
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Facilitated Group Discussions
Beyond Nutrition Counseling: Reframing the Battle Against Obesity is ideally used in conjunction with a discussion guide, specially developed by the project team for conducting a facilitated group discussion around the content of the video. The discussion guide encourages interaction among health professionals to identify ways in which WIC might be more effective in addressing the problem of childhood obesity.
Following a brief introduction about why and how the video was developed, the 20-minute video is shown. A facilitated group discussion follows and is designed to help the health professionals articulate:
- Barriers to preventing and managing obesity among children enrolled in WIC.
- Steps that might be taken to prevent and manage obesity among children enrolled in WIC.
At the end of the 75-minute session, the health professionals are left with a specific list of counseling strategies that could be implemented immediately and that would not necessarily require structural changes in WIC. These strategies might include, for example, open-ended questions to use with clients when discussing obesity. Such questions would help bridge the gap that currently exists between provider and client perceptions about the problem of obesity.
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To help with your Facilitated Group Discussion, you can download an Outline and Discussion Guide in portable document format (.pdf):
You must have Adobe Acrobat" Reader installed on your computer to read this file. You can download Adobe Acrobat" Reader at Adobe's Web site by selecting the version appropriate for your type of computer.
