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Effects of the Active Kids voucher program on children and adolescents’ physical activity: a natural experiment evaluating a state-wide intervention

BACKGROUND: There is an urgent need for scaled-up effective interventions which overcome barriers to health-enhancing physical activity for children and adolescents. In New South Wales (NSW), Australia, the state government implemented a universal voucher program, ‘Active Kids’ to support the cost o...

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Autores principales: Foley, Bridget C., Owen, Katherine B., Bauman, Adrian E., Bellew, William, Reece, Lindsey J.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7798231/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33423663
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-10060-5
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author Foley, Bridget C.
Owen, Katherine B.
Bauman, Adrian E.
Bellew, William
Reece, Lindsey J.
author_facet Foley, Bridget C.
Owen, Katherine B.
Bauman, Adrian E.
Bellew, William
Reece, Lindsey J.
author_sort Foley, Bridget C.
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: There is an urgent need for scaled-up effective interventions which overcome barriers to health-enhancing physical activity for children and adolescents. In New South Wales (NSW), Australia, the state government implemented a universal voucher program, ‘Active Kids’ to support the cost of structured physical activity registration for school-enrolled children aged 4.5–18 years old. The objective of this study was to understand the effects a financial incentive intervention delivered in a real-world setting has on children and adolescent’s physical activity participation. METHOD: In 2018, all children and adolescents registered for an Active Kids voucher provided sociodemographic characteristics, physical activity and research consent. This prospective cohort study used an online survey with validated items to measure physical activity and other personal and social factors in children and adolescents who used an Active Kids voucher. Generalized linear mixed models were used to examine changes from registration to after voucher use at ≤8 weeks, 9–26 weeks and ≥ 6 months. RESULTS: Study participants reported increasing their days achieving physical activity guidelines from 4.0 days per week (95%CI 3.8, 4.2) at registration (n = 37,626 children) to 4.9 days per week (95%CI 4.7, 5.1) after 6 months (n = 14,118 children). Increased physical activity was observed for all sociodemographic population groups. The voucher-specific activity contributed 42.4% (95%CI 39.3, 45.5) to the total time children participated in structured physical activities outside of school. Children and adolescents who increased to, or maintained, high levels of activity were socially supported to be active, had active parent/caregivers, had better concentration and were overall happier than their low-active counterparts. CONCLUSION: The Active Kids program significantly increased children’s physical activity levels and these increases continued over a six-month period. The Active Kids voucher program shows promise as a scaled-up intervention to increase children and adolescents’ physical activity participation. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trial Registry ACTRN12618000897268, approved May 29th, 2018 - Retrospectively registered. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-020-10060-5.
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spelling pubmed-77982312021-01-11 Effects of the Active Kids voucher program on children and adolescents’ physical activity: a natural experiment evaluating a state-wide intervention Foley, Bridget C. Owen, Katherine B. Bauman, Adrian E. Bellew, William Reece, Lindsey J. BMC Public Health Research Article BACKGROUND: There is an urgent need for scaled-up effective interventions which overcome barriers to health-enhancing physical activity for children and adolescents. In New South Wales (NSW), Australia, the state government implemented a universal voucher program, ‘Active Kids’ to support the cost of structured physical activity registration for school-enrolled children aged 4.5–18 years old. The objective of this study was to understand the effects a financial incentive intervention delivered in a real-world setting has on children and adolescent’s physical activity participation. METHOD: In 2018, all children and adolescents registered for an Active Kids voucher provided sociodemographic characteristics, physical activity and research consent. This prospective cohort study used an online survey with validated items to measure physical activity and other personal and social factors in children and adolescents who used an Active Kids voucher. Generalized linear mixed models were used to examine changes from registration to after voucher use at ≤8 weeks, 9–26 weeks and ≥ 6 months. RESULTS: Study participants reported increasing their days achieving physical activity guidelines from 4.0 days per week (95%CI 3.8, 4.2) at registration (n = 37,626 children) to 4.9 days per week (95%CI 4.7, 5.1) after 6 months (n = 14,118 children). Increased physical activity was observed for all sociodemographic population groups. The voucher-specific activity contributed 42.4% (95%CI 39.3, 45.5) to the total time children participated in structured physical activities outside of school. Children and adolescents who increased to, or maintained, high levels of activity were socially supported to be active, had active parent/caregivers, had better concentration and were overall happier than their low-active counterparts. CONCLUSION: The Active Kids program significantly increased children’s physical activity levels and these increases continued over a six-month period. The Active Kids voucher program shows promise as a scaled-up intervention to increase children and adolescents’ physical activity participation. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trial Registry ACTRN12618000897268, approved May 29th, 2018 - Retrospectively registered. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-020-10060-5. BioMed Central 2021-01-11 /pmc/articles/PMC7798231/ /pubmed/33423663 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-10060-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research Article
Foley, Bridget C.
Owen, Katherine B.
Bauman, Adrian E.
Bellew, William
Reece, Lindsey J.
Effects of the Active Kids voucher program on children and adolescents’ physical activity: a natural experiment evaluating a state-wide intervention
title Effects of the Active Kids voucher program on children and adolescents’ physical activity: a natural experiment evaluating a state-wide intervention
title_full Effects of the Active Kids voucher program on children and adolescents’ physical activity: a natural experiment evaluating a state-wide intervention
title_fullStr Effects of the Active Kids voucher program on children and adolescents’ physical activity: a natural experiment evaluating a state-wide intervention
title_full_unstemmed Effects of the Active Kids voucher program on children and adolescents’ physical activity: a natural experiment evaluating a state-wide intervention
title_short Effects of the Active Kids voucher program on children and adolescents’ physical activity: a natural experiment evaluating a state-wide intervention
title_sort effects of the active kids voucher program on children and adolescents’ physical activity: a natural experiment evaluating a state-wide intervention
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7798231/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33423663
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-10060-5
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