PREVENT

Improving and upscaling primary prevention of cancer by addressing childhood obesity through implementation research – the PREVENT approach

Why it matters

PREVENT improves upscaling of primary interventions for weight control management during childhood and adolescence to reduce cancer risks in adulthood. This relies on current evidence that relates excess body weight with increased cancer risk.

Towards this end, PREVENT applies a series of implementation research:

– it identifies barriers to current interventions and policies preventing them from upscaling to different geographical, socio-economic, and cultural settings.

– It introduces new multi-actor (e.g., students, family, educators, policymakers) and context-aware (tailored to the specific implementation places, i.e. class, canteen, sports fields, labs, outside school) interventions along with new user engagement strategies to face the current upscaling bottlenecks

The PREVENT new policies are adapted, piloted, and scaled up within the schools’ communities of three European countries facing different epidemiological settings on childhood obesity, geographic, socio-economic and cultural attributes. The pilots are designed to be holistic end-to-end ecosystems, including users, medical professionals, policymakers, public

authorities, and civil communities. They focus on the whole school communities of Greece, Sweden, and Spain-Catalonia, PREVENT outreach to more than 3.3 million students, required for guideline provisioning, large-scale implementation, multiparameter assessment, and scaling-up. Co-creation, active behavioral change, self-evaluation through user empowerment, motivational interviewing, social innovation, digital-assistive engagement, health apps, and multi-domain assessment are implementation research aspects of PREVENT to advance user acceptability and compatibility with existing policies, and thus improve sustainability and upscaling.

What CPE does

CPE contributes to the identification of barriers and new intervention policies. CPE brings its experience in the design of the Living Labs and, in the implementation set-up, assesses the new policies.