Parents of teenagers know first-hand how hard it is to encourage them to have healthy diets and take part in regular physical
activity or organised sport. Teenagers have so much else going on in their lives and healthy eating/physical activity are not usually at the top of their agenda. We get that. That is why we have developed the Engaging Adolescents in Changing Behaviour (EACH-B) programme, to develop and test a new intervention that aims to encourage young people to eat healthily and move more.
We are rolling out EACH-B in 50 schools across Hampshire and the surrounding areas, and each school will take part as either a control (comparison) school or an intervention school. This is what is known as a randomised control trial, or RCT for short. We will measure the young people’s health status once in Year 8 and once again in Year 9, by asking them to complete a series of questionnaires about their eating habits, their activity levels and their wellbeing. We will also ask them to wear an activity tracker for one week to measure how much activity they do. At the end of the trial we will compare the control school and the intervention school children, to see if there is a difference in these health markers between the two groups. The intervention school children will have been exposed to what we are testing, known as “the intervention” which consists of three main elements:
- specialist teacher training in Healthy Conversation Skills
- teaching of the LifeLab module in school and an activity day at LifeLab
- access to a smartphone app with games to encourage healthy lifestyle choices
For children in the intervention arm of the study, there will also be a parent app so that parents can support their child at home.
If you would like to know more about the EACH-B trial, or would like to find out if your child’s school is taking part, please email us at eachb@mrc.soton.ac.uk
EACH-B is funded by the National Institute for Health Research, and has full ethical approval from the University of Southampton’s Faculty of Medicine Ethics board: Ethics number 49226
