The Choosing Healthy Eating for Infant Health (CHErIsH) intervention

Childhood obesity is a significant public health challenge, with one in five children living with overweight or obesity globally. Development of childhood obesity is influenced by early infant feeding.

The Choosing Healthy Eating for Infant Health (CHErIsH) intervention was created to support caregiver’s infant feeding practices (e.g., breastfeeding, complementary feeding) and help parents with healthy feeding for their babies. CHErIsH was developed to be delivered by healthcare professionals in primary care centres during childhood vaccination visits (when infants are 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, 12 months, and 13 months old). Development and evaluation of the original CHErIsH intervention was funded by a Health Research Board Interdisciplinary Capacity Enhancement Award, awarded to Prof Patricia Kearney.

A feasibility study examining the implementation of the CHErIsH intervention in the Mallow Primary Healthcare Centre Cork, identified key challenges and areas for refinement relating to trial processes and delivery of the intervention. The Re-CHErIsH project was established to identify potential refinements to the recruitment processes and intervention delivery to maximise the likelihood of successful future implementation and evaluation of the CHErIsH intervention. The Re-CHErIsH project aims will be achieved through a three project phases:

• Phase 1: The identification and development of potential refinements to the recruitment processes and intervention delivery. This will be completed by taking learnings from the preliminary evaluation of the CHErIsH intervention and input from the multidisciplinary project team.
• Phase 2: Evaluating caregiver attitudes and perspectives about proposed refinements through a mixed-methods survey of pregnant women and caregivers of children up to two years old.
• Phase 3: Bringing together stakeholders (e.g., healthcare professionals, policy makers, and caregivers) to determine and agree on the refined trial processes and intervention delivery via a co-development workshop.

The refined recruitment processes and intervention delivery resulting from this project can be examined in future pilot and definitive trials with potential to optimise infant feeding and prevent childhood obesity outcomes.

Re-CHErIsH is funded by a HRB Primary Care Clinical Trials Network Ireland Seed Funding Award to Dr Karen Matvienko-Sikar.

Core Outcome Set for Early intervention trials to Prevent Obesity in Childhood (COS-EPOCH)

The Core Outcome Set for Early intervention trials to Prevent Obesity in Childhood (COS-EPOCH) is an agreed minimum set of outcomes recommended for measurement in early childhood obesity prevention interventions. Further details about the 22 outcomes from 9 outcome domains are available here. The next step in this research is determining how to measure the COS-EPOCH outcomes. This process will involve 1) identifying existing measurement instruments used in early childhood obesity prevention interventions, 2) evaluating the measurement instruments’ quality, and 3) determining if the measurement instruments are fit-for-purpose through stakeholder consultation. The outcome of this research will be a toolkit of reliable, valid, and appropriate measurement instruments for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to synthesise and evaluate the effects of interventions to prevent early childhood obesity.

EPOCH COMS OSF:  https://osf.io/359tu/

The outcomes and outcome domains included in the EPOCH COS, for which a core outcome measurement set is being developed.