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A warm and sincere thank you to Katie Pospiech, our Healthy Start / Départ Santé Knowledge Development and Exchange Coordinator for the past year and a half. As her journey with our project draws to a close, we wish to thank Katie for her contribution to the team and to the project. Her kind, quiet disposition and sweet demeanour helped guide our work in advancing Healthy Start / Départ Santé!

Encouraging healthy eating and physical activity in the early years of a child’s life could have long lasting effects into adulthood. On January 18th, coordinators, community partners and policy makers gathered at the Healthy Start/Départ Santé Symposium in Saskatoon to share and reveal how healthy eating and physical activity have an immediate and long term impact. “As an adult, it is expected that the children who become healthier will be using less of those health care services – that means there’s substantial saving there for the publicly funded health care system,” panelist Dr. Nasmi Sari said during at the symposium. “That’s a benefit that you will get out of this intervention.” Healthy Start/Départ Santé is a bilingual initiative intended to encourage healthy eating and physical activity for children aged three to five in Saskatchewan and New Brunswick. The initiative originated from a partnership of individuals and organizations that wanted to include an early years component to the Saskatoon Health Region’s in-motion program. Dr. Sari has experience in researching healthcare financing reforms, as well as quality and efficiency issues in hospital markets. He added that if the Healthy Start/Départ Santé initiative results in having any impact on the lives of people later on in life, such as shorter hospital stays, that could mean cost savings on the health care system. Healthy Start/Départ Santé has already lead to immediate changes within the childcare centres where it has been implemented. Tasha Balkwill, executive director of the Whitmore Park Child Care Co-op in Regina, has been using the Healthy Start/Départ in her day care for about a year. She noted how the children are no longer scared of trying new foods thanks to fun and easy Healthy Start/Départ Santé ideas implemented in the daily routine. “The children will eat really quite anything we put out now,” Balkwill said. “They’re not scared of new foods and the children that are more hesitant to eat new foods are way more accepting to try it.” Healthy Start/Départ Santé encourages staff and educators to provide children with healthy foods to choose from. When given a choice, children appeared to be more likely to try new foods, Balkwill said. To promote activity, the initiative suggests that children should reach about 180 minutes of physical activity a day – which can seem like a daunting task, Balkwill noted. “It’s not always vigorous (activity),” Balkwill said. “It could be bending down to clean up, just anything where their entire body is moving or part of their body is moving so they’re not just sitting still in a solitary state all day, sitting on the carpet doing nothing. “That has really jump started us and changed the centre quite a bit,” she added. What’s next for Healthy Start/Départ Santé? Healthy Start/ Départ Santé project manager Gabrielle Lepage-Lavoie noted the symposium was an opportunity to share results from the last four years with key stakeholders, government partners and policy makers. The Symposium also marks the end of Phase 2 of the initiative. “We wanted to be able to tell our story, share some successes, lessons learned and then to launch our continued work with Phase 3,” Lepage-Lavoie said. Phase 3, expected to continue until 2019, will focus on long-term sustainability and expansion of Healthy Start/Départ Santé in both Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, funded in part by the Public Health Agency of Canada. Lepage-Lavoie noted the third phase is also an opportunity to create a sustainability mechanism for the initiative, such as an online training. The Healthy Start/Départ Santé team will look for ways to increase parent engagement and adapt the initiative for various cultures. “It will be a jam packed three years,” Lepage-Lavoie said. Healthy Start is led by the Réseau Santé en français de la Saskatchewan is funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Community Initiatives Fund; and partnered with the University of Saskatchewan including the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology, College of Medicine; College of Kinesiology; College of Pharmacy & Nutrition. Other Healthy Start partners include the Centre de formation médicale du N-B, (Université de Sherbrooke et de Moncton, New Brunswick); Saskatchewan Early Childhood Association (SECA); the Saskatchewan Prevention Institute; Active Kids/Jeunes actifs, New Brunswick; Association des parents Fransaskois (APF); NB Family Resource Centres; ECE Colleges in Saskatchewan and New Brunswick; and the Ministries of Education and Health in Saskatchewan and New Brunswick.

On January 18th, the Healthy Start / Départ Santé team held a Symposium to celebrate their achievements in Phase 2 and to share the plan for the future of the project. The day was packed full with 15 amazing presenters each sharing about how they were uniquely involved with Healthy Start. In the morning, we heard a panel of presenters discuss how Healthy Start has impacted ‘Me, My Centre, and My Community’ and also a presentation on the impact of Healthy Start on the health and wellness of young children. After lunch, the Healthy Start team wanted to energize the crowd, so they led everyone in the ABC for Fitness Chant – it was so much fun! After that, several presenters shared their views on the importance of investing in the early years. Finally, the plan for the future was launched! Cultural adaptation, parent engagement and online training will be the priorities and participants made many valuable suggestions to help the project succeed. All in all, it was a great day and the HSDS team would like to thank everyone who joined us in-person and online! For more information about the Symposium, please check the links below: Presentations: What did it cost to implement Healthy Start – Dr Nazmi Sari The value of multi-sectorial collaboration -Dr Hassan Vatanparast & Naomi Shanks HSDS A population health intervention -Dr Anne Leis & Dr Stephanie Ward E-Learning Group – Pedagogy, strategy, design & technology – Mireille Caissie Healthy Together© – An Innovative Family Education Model Issues & barriers for facilitators regarding parent engagement – In Phase 3, HSDS will be partnering with another PHAC IS project ‘Healthy Together’ to collaborate on parent engagement. Please see the following documents for more information on the Healthy Together project or visit their website at www.healthy-together.ca Photos and Videos: Live Stream Photo Album Publication: The Saskatchewan/New Brunswick Healthy Start-Départ Santé intervention: implementation cost estimates -Dr NazmiSari

The Réseau Santé en français de la Saskatchewan cordially invites you to attend: The 2017 Healthy Start / Départ Santé Symposium Connecting research to practice & policy January 18, 2016 When? Wednesday January 18th, 2017 from 10am to 4pm Where? Location TBA – Saskatoon, SK Why?  The Healthy Start / Départ Santé early years health promotion project is coming to a close after four years of implementation – what have we learned and where do we go from here? Who? All partners, stakeholders and community members who are interested in hearing about what this project has accomplished over the past 4 years.  Please forward or share in your networks. What?        The story of Healthy Start / Départ Santé: the people, the engagement, the successes, and lessons learnt. Highlights of the day will include: An overview of key realisations An opportunity to delve further into the evaluation study with the research team Stakeholders sharing how HSDS impacted them or their organization Outlining specific strategies for the sustainability of Healthy Start / Départ Santé. Main objectives for the day: Share the story of Healthy Start / Départ Santé and how it has impacted participants, collaborators and partners alike. Disseminate research findings, review best practices and lessons learned. Look to the future: scaling up Healthy Start / Départ Santé. Yes, I am interested in attending! click here

Did you know that Healthy Start staff aren’t the only ones who lead training sessions? Since 2014, Healthy Start has trained roughly 30 people from across the province to be HSDS Community Trainers – we even have one trainer located in New Brunswick! Our Community Trainers work in a variety of roles such as daycare staff, teachers, dietitians and more, but they have been brought together with a common passion for encouraging healthy lifestyles. Their role as a Community Trainer is to work in coordination with our staff to deliver regular training sessions in both English and French to early years’ centres. It will be a busy autumn for our Community Trainers as many of them have already signed up for trainings in and around their home communities. Community Trainers are a key part of ensuring that the Healthy Start initiative will be carried into the future. Thanks to their dedication, Healthy Start will be able to reach many more children!

One of the core components of the Healthy Start / Départ Santé initiative is the comprehensive outcome evaluation study. This study is being conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Saskatchewan and the Université de Moncton, in New Brunswick. The purpose is to evaluate whether or not implementing the Healthy Start program in early learning centres leads to increased healthy behaviours among preschoolers compared to centres who did not receive training. In order to measure the effect of Healthy Start, some of the information that was collected includes: measuring physical activity levels; a nutrition assessment; parent surveys around knowledge on physical activity and healthy eating; and observations on the how physical environment in the centres supported healthy eating and physical activity. In total, 61 early learning centres were recruited in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan; 31 centres were randomly assigned to the ‘Intervention’ arm (these centres received the Healthy Start training) and 30 centres were assigned to the ‘Control’ arm (these centres did not receive any training). The research team wanted to compare a before and after picture, so they collected data from each centre at two time points: once before the training session and then again 6-8 months afterwards. Even though the centres in the ‘Control’ arm did not receive training, data was still collected twice 6-8 months apart for comparison. These centres were offered a training session after data collection was complete. After three years of data collection, almost 900 children participated! The research team is working quickly to analyze the data and they are happy to share that so far, the results look promising. Healthy Start would like to once again, say thank you to all the centres and families who generously agreed to participate in this very important early years study – we could not have done this without your contributions!