Abstract
Introduction: The Netherlands Nutrition Centre developed guidelines to improve the availability and accessibility of healthier food products in Dutch canteens. This paper describes the development of an implementation plan to facilitate implementation of Guidelines for Healthier Canteens in Dutch secondary schools.Materials and Methods: In cooperation with stakeholders (i.e., school/caterer managers/employees, school canteen advisors, researchers) and based on theory, we developed an implementation plan in three steps. First, we identified factors that impede/facilitate stakeholders to create a healthier school canteen during 14 interviews. Second, 25 experts discussed and prioritized these identified factors in an expert meeting. Third, we translated these factors into tools to be included in the implementation plan, by making use of behavior change taxonomies and evidence-based implementation strategies.Results: The plan aims to support stakeholders in implementing healthier school canteens and consists of five tools: (1) tailored advice based on an online questionnaire to assess schools' and stakeholders' context and the Canteen Scan (i.e., an online tool to assess the availability and accessibility of food/drink products); (2) communication materials with information and examples; (3) online community for support by sharing experiences/questions; (4) digital newsletter as reminder/support; (5) fact sheet with students' needs/wishes to tailor the canteen.Discussion: This study illustrates how collaboration between science, policy and practice resulted in a tailored implementation plan aimed to support schools to adhere to school canteen policy. This development serves as a good example for researchers, health promotion policymakers, and practitioners how to create an implementation plan that fits the needs of stakeholders.
Highlights
The Netherlands Nutrition Centre developed guidelines to improve the availability and accessibility of healthier food products in Dutch canteens
This study illustrates the application of a stepwise systematic method for the development of an implementation plan to support the implementation of the Guidelines for Healthier Canteens, aimed at creating healthier canteens in Dutch secondary schools
A strength of our study is that we developed implementation tools that can be tailored to the needs of a specific school, to the school’s context and to the implementation phase, as some schools are just starting with implementing a healthy school canteen while others have been involved in the healthy school canteen for years
Summary
The Netherlands Nutrition Centre developed guidelines to improve the availability and accessibility of healthier food products in Dutch canteens. Adolescents are known to be prone to adapt unhealthy behaviors, as they are moving on to more autonomy, are developing their own identity, and are developing habits, including dietary ones [3, 4]. This makes stimulating a healthy dietary pattern in this age group very important. Healthy school food environments encourage adolescents to make healthier choices [5, 6] In this context, it has been demonstrated that school food policy, among others a healthier school canteen, can stimulate healthy dietary behaviors among youth [7, 8]. Even though most Dutch students (aged 12–18 year) bring their own lunches from home, they buy complementary foods (snacks and drinks) in the school canteen and around school [10]
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