UAB – NCHPAD & Lakeshore Foundation

UAB – NCHPAD 2016-2021 

The American Association on Health and Disability will be collaborating with the National Center on Health, Physical Activity and Disability (NCHPAD) on a five year cooperative agreement funded by the CDC, National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.

Reversing the disproportionately higher rates of obesity among children and adults with disability requires a comprehensive and coordinated approach that uses policy, system and environmental change (PSE) to transform communities into inclusive health communities that support and promote healthy lifestyle choices for people with disability. NCHPAD will use a new knowledge-to-practice framework (N-KATS, NCHPAD Knowledge Adaptation, Translation and Scale up) to achieve three short-term and five intermediate outcomes.  The N-KATS framework contains four sequenced phases. Phase I involves the collection of existing evidence-based programs and models in physical activity, nutrition and obesity that are reviewed, catalogued and systematically adapted with a new tool (GRAIDs, Guidelines, Recommendations and Adaptations Including Disability) that separates the core components of a program into five recommendation and adaptation domains (built environment, equipment, services, instructional, policy). 15 GRAID accessibility criteria are used to ensure strong fidelity between and within program adaptations.  Phase II focuses on the dissemination of resources, materials, and tools to early adopters and ‘shovel-ready’ programs through national networks and partnerships. Phase III provides inclusive health promotion training to a select group of service providers with Center staff serving as facilitators. And Phase IV captures successful elements of community health inclusion (i.e., PSEs) through a comprehensive data collection system that efficiently and effectively scales ‘best practices’ to a growing number of communities nationwide. In the aggregate, these four phases are aimed at accomplishing three short-term (STO) and five intermediate (IO) outcomes: Increased availability and use of community models, tools, and resources (STO1); Increased knowledge and awareness of health risk factors in people with disability (STO2); Improved collaboration with partners (STO3); Improved evidence base for health promotion programs (IO1); Increased adoption of inclusive programmatic, policy, systems, and environmental changes (IO2); Increased participation in evidence-based and innovative health promotion programs (IO3); Improved organizational capacity to serve communities across the U.S. (IO4); and Improved data collection methods to capture successful ‘best practices’(IO5). With NCHPAD’s new knowledge-to-practice framework (N-KATS), the Center now has the capacity to build and expand upon successful, inclusive ‘best practices’ that can transform communities into places that support and promote healthy lifestyles for the more than 50 million Americans with disability.

Partner expansion and material and resource dissemination is a key component of the NCHPAD project.  AAHD will be involved in the pieces of the cooperative agreement that focus on dissemination, outreach and evaluation.  AAHD has been a formal partner with NCHPAD since 2012 and has worked with NCHPAD staff since 2002.

Please visit the NCHPAD website at www.nchpad.org to learn more about this initiative and the outstanding work that is being conducted at the University of Alabama and the Lakeshore Foundation.

Recently released Guidelines on Disability Inclusion on Physical Activity, Nutrition and Obesity: click here.  Also click on guidelines on the right of this page.

 

Lakeshore Foundation

The Lakeshore Foundation is located in Birmingham, Alabama and is an internationally renowned organization. Lakeshore Foundation works closely with the National Center on Health, Physical Activity and Disability (NCHPAD) at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, AL. Lakeshore is open to anyone in the community and state living with a physical disability.  Lakeshore is a training facility for the Paralympics. Lakeshore is currently involved in providing training for 12 competitive sports,14 local, national and global advocacy initiatives, 92 aquatic, fitness and recreation programs, and 25 research projects.

The mission of Lakeshore Foundation is to enable people with a physical disability and chronic health condition to lead healthy, active and independent lifestyles through physical activity sport, recreation, advocacy, policy and research.  The vision of Lakeshore Foundation is to improve the lives of people with physical disability around the world.  The values of Lakeshore Foundation are passion, creating opportunities, integrity, and changing expectations.

Lakeshore’s advocacy agenda is essentially about policy changes in three areas:

1. Creating policies where they do not exist
2. Refining harmful and ineffective policies, and
3. Ensuring good policies are followed, implemented and enforced.

AAHD is honored to serve as Lakeshore’s “advocacy” voice in Washington, DC.  For further information about the AAHD and lakeshore Foundation partnership, please email contact@aahd.us

Please visit the Lakeshore Foundation at www.lakeshore.org