CDC Releases New Resources for Hospitals to Create Healthier Environments

CDC Releases New Resources for Hospitals to Create Healthier Environments

CDC Releases New Resources for Hospitals to Create Healthier Environments

Hospitals have a role to play in creating settings that encourage healthier eating and physical activity choices for their employees, patients, visitors, and residents of surrounding communities.

To support the creation of healthier hospital environments, CDC has released two new online resources for hospital administrators, nutritionists, human resources employee health staff, and other interested supporters. These tools can be used to assess and improve food and beverages offered by hospitals in cafeterias, vending machines, or other eating areas, as well as physical activity offerings such as stairs, walking trails, fitness centers, classes, and programs.

A Step-by-Step Guide: Using the Healthy Hospital Food, Beverage, and Physical Activity Environments Scans. This tool provides guidance for hospital staff on gathering information about their facility that will be helpful in identifying opportunities for providing healthier options.  Once gathered, this information is also useful for ongoing measurement and evaluation. Creating Healthier Hospital Food, Beverage, and Physical Activity Environments: Forming Teams, Engaging Stakeholders, Conducting Assessments and Evaluations.  This document provides guidance to hospital staff on using strategies to promote healthier food, healthier beverages, and physical activity choices, as well as specific steps on how to evaluate these efforts.

In 2012, more than 5,700 hospitals were registered with the American Hospital Association. These facilities provided more than 481 million outpatient visits and 37 million inpatient admissions, and they employed more than 6.3 million people.  CDC is working to promote healthier food, beverage, and physical activity choices through using standards such as those in the Health and Sustainability Guidelines and using the  Steps to Wellness guide for the millions of people engaged in hospital systems nationwide.

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Visit CDC Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity for more information on community strategies and solutions to combat obesity.