Nemours Health & Prevention Services Fact Sheet

Nemours Health and Prevention Services (NHPS), a non-profit organization based in Newark, Delaware, works with families and community partners to help children grow up healthy. Its goal is to affect long-term changes in policies and practices that promote child health and to leverage community strengths and resources to have the greatest impact on the most children.

Mission

• NHPS strives to help children lead healthier lives by: 
• Working hand-in-hand with Delaware communities to emphasize child health promotion in all the places where children live, learn, and grow
• Supporting implementation of health promotion policies and practices and evaluating them to learn what is working best
• Sharing findings and contributing to the knowledge base in the field of child health promotion and disease prevention 
• Advocating for social, environmental, and behavioral change that will lead to healthier generations of children to come
  

Who We Are

Nemours Health and Prevention Services is a division of Nemours, a non-profit organization dedicated to children’s health and health care. Nemours operates the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children and outpatient facilities in Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Florida. NHPS complements Nemours’ tradition of pediatric patient care, research, and training by promoting the health of the whole child within his or her family and community.

NHPS sees its role as one of catalyst, “planting the seeds for better health” by working with community partners to reach children in a variety of settings. Childhood nutrition, physical activity (obesity prevention), and emotional/behavioral health are the division’s primary focus areas.

What We Do

The primary goal of NHPS is to bring about societal change in which people place high value on child health and wellness. NHPS emphasizes working with and through its community-based partners to reach the most children and have the greatest impact. We seek to leverage resources and apply evidence-based knowledge and skills, in other words, “best practices” that have been proven promising or effective through evaluation.

One of our initial areas of emphasis is childhood obesity prevention through promotion of healthy lifestyles, the centerpiece of which is the 5-2-1-Almost None campaign. This “formula for a healthy lifestyle” encourages eating at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, watching two or fewer hours of screen time a day, getting one or more hours of physical activity a day, and drinking almost no sugary beverages. Using a holistic approach to the child’s world in order to have the greatest impact, NHPS considers the many different places where children and families spend their time: 

• Schools - In school settings, NHPS works with teams of administrators, teachers, counselors, school nurses, parents, and the students themselves to provide training and educational tools and to support policy and environmental changes that encourage healthier eating and more physical activity on school campuses.
• Child Care - In the child care setting, NHPS provides training and educational tools to help child care providers promote and model healthy behaviors for young children. In addition, NHPS advocates for adoption of 5-2-1-Almost None principles as part of state quality rating and improvement systems for child care providers.
  
• Primary Care - In the primary care setting, Nemours convenes pediatric primary care providers from across the state to participate in study groups focused on improving office-based weight management and health promotion skills. Practitioners learn about new interventions and receive tools for use in the office setting as well as take-home materials for families. 
• Out-of-School Time Organizations - Nemours Health & Prevention Services is collaborating with a number of Delaware organizations to increase healthy eating and physical activity during out-of-school time, such as after school and summer programming. We support more than 100 after school sites throughout Delaware in creating environments that promote and reinforce the 5-2-1-Almost None healthy behaviors. 
• Built Environment - NHPS is committed to promoting children’s health in all the places where they live, learn, and play. That’s why we want to make sure that Delaware’s communities provide children and families access to opportunities to be physically active and to eat healthy foods. 
• Community Engagement - A concentrated effort to promote child health in all settings is underway in Sussex County, Delaware. More than 100 organizations make up the Sussex Child Health Promotion Coalition including a broad range of business, government, nonprofit, educational, and faith-based participants. A concentrated effort to involve grassroots leadership in child health promotion is also underway in the city of Wilmington.
  

The Campaign

In October 2007, more than 125 Delaware leaders, led by then-Governor Ruth Ann Minner, came together to support a multi-year, statewide campaign to “Make Delaware’s Kids the Healthiest in the Nation.” This campaign encourages and celebrates the efforts of schools, child care centers, communities, health professionals, parents, and other leaders to improve the motivation, ability, and opportunity for children to eat right and be more physically active. Read more about The Campaign.