Tracking Physical Activity and Nutrition Policies and Practices in Early Childhood Education and Care: Five Years Post-Implementation of a Provincial-Level Active Play Standard.

Abstract

Background: Early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings are key for improving health behaviors, including physical activity (PA) and nutrition. In 2017, the province of British Columbia (BC) implemented a provincial-level Active Play policy supported by a capacity-building intervention. Significant improvements in all PA policies and practices and the majority of nutrition policies were observed post-implementation. The purpose of this study was to understand if PA and nutrition policies and practices were maintained at 5+ years post-provincial policy implementation. Methods: This study employed a repeated cross-sectional design to distribute surveys querying about PA and nutrition policies and practices to ECEC centers across BC at three time points: time 1, prior to implementation of the Active Play standard (2016-2017) and capacity-building intervention, time 2, 1-2 years post-implementation (2018-2019), and time 3, 5+ years post-implementation (2022-2023). Results: The majority of PA and all nutrition policies were maintained from time 2 (n = 378) to time 3 (n = 639). Prevalence of policies related to the provision of activities that address fundamental movement skills (odds ratio [OR] = 0.30) and total amount of active play (OR = 0.56) significantly decreased from time 2 to time 3. All reported PA practice prevalence levels decreased to time 1 levels. Conclusions: Center-level health behavior policies were largely maintained 5 years post-implementation, except some PA policies and practices returned to pre-implementation levels. Staff capacity and turnover as well as change in implementation support may explain these changes. Ongoing implementation support is needed to ensure maintenance of health promoting policies and practices in ECEC.