Contact:   Jessica Salazar
Phone:  (816) 346-1346
E-mail:  jmsalazar@cmh.edu

Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics has been selected as one of seven hospitals nationwide to participate in the newly-created Youth Obesity Learning Collaborative. These hospitals will work together to develop best practices and national guidelines to prevent and reduce youth obesity.

Dozens of hospitals nationwide applied to be part of the Collaborative, and participants were selected by an expert panel through a competitive review.

“To be selected as a member of the Youth Obesity Learning Collaborative is wonderful confirmation that what we are doing to fight childhood obesity makes us one of the best,” says Sarah Hampl, MD, a general pediatrician with an emphasis in youth obesity at Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics. “We are looking forward to working with other leading hospitals nationwide to try to fight this growing trend that is such a hazard to our children’s health.”

Examples of obesity programs Children’s Mercy has initiated include:

• PHIT KIDS (Promoting Health in Tweens and Kids) Clinic: Following a year-long collaboration of Children’s Mercy staff, a clinical practice guideline on weight management was distributed in late 2004. The CPG guided the development of a multidisciplinary weight management program, which uses principles of motivational interviewing to treat obese children, primarily of African-American and Latino origin. 
• Healthy Kids University:  Children’s Mercy staff provides a variety of educational talks about childhood obesity, healthy family nutrition and physical activity across the metropolitan area through this program, in partnership with Kohl’s department stores and YMCAs of greater Kansas City.
• Children’s Mercy Body Shop:  This 6-week educational intervention for obese children and parents has been administered for the past 17 years by the hospital’s Nutrition department.

In addition, Children’s Mercy Hospital employees have leadership roles in a variety of community obesity prevention initiatives, including KID POWER, a healthy lifestyles educational intervention for tweens administered by the National Kidney Foundation of Kansas and Western Missouri in conjunction with the Maternal and Child Health Coalition; Weighing In, a pediatric obesity community collaborative; and the Prevention of Obesity in School Health (POSH) project through the Kansas chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Learning Collaborative members will participate in face-to-face and “virtual” meetings to exchange program approaches, practices, outcomes and measurement tools and data. The hospitals will work with the Centers for Disease Control to develop tools and guidance for hospitals, public health and other community partners around the country to reduce youth obesity.

The Youth Obesity Learning Collaborative will be overseen by the Health Research and Educational Trust, which is a subgroup of the American Hospital Association. The Collaborative will be funded through a $100,000 grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a $50,000 grant from American Hospital Association.

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