An assessment of the potential of family day care as a nutrition promotion setting in South Australia

Articles > Journals > Health journals > Nutrition & Dietetics: The Journal of the Dieticians Association of Australia articles > March 2003 Article: An assessment of the potential of Family Day Care as a nutrition promotion setting in South Australia. (Original Research). Article from:Nutrition & Dietetics: The Journal of the Dieticians Association of Australia Article date:March 1, 2003 Author:Daniels, Lynne A.; Franco, Bunny; McWhinnie, Julie-Anne CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Dietitians Association of Australia. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights or concerns about this content should be directed to customer service. (Hide copyright information) Related articles Ads by Google TAFE Child Care Courses Government accredited courses. Study anytime, anywhere. www.seeklearning.com.au Get Work in Child Care Certificate III Children's Services 4 Day Course + Take Home Assessment HBAconsult.com.au Abstract Objective: To assess the potential role of Family Day Care in nutrition promotion for preschool children. Design and setting: A questionnaire to examine nutrition-related issues and practices was mailed to care providers registered in the southern region of Adelaide, South Australia. Care providers also supplied a descriptive, qualitative recall of the food provided by parents or themselves to each child less than five years of age in their care on the day closest to completion of the questionnaire. Subjects: 255 care providers. The response rate was 63% and covered 643 preschool children, mean 4.6 (SD 2.8) children per carer. Results: There was clear agreement that nutrition promotion was a relevant issue for Family Day Care providers. Nutrition and food hygiene knowledge was good but only 54% of respondents felt confident to address food quality issues with parents. Sixty-five percent of respondents reported non-neutral approaches to food refusal and dawdling (reward, punishment, cajoling) that overrode the child's control of the amount eaten. The food recalls indicated that most children (> 75%) were offered fruit at least once. Depending on the hours in care, (0 to 4, 5 to 8, greater than 8 hours), 20%, 32% and 55%, respectively, of children were offered milk and 65%, 82% and 87%, respectively, of children were offered high fat and sugar foods. Conclusions: Questionnaire responses suggest that many care providers are committed to and proactive in a range of nutrition promotion activities. There is scope for strengthening skills in the management of common problems, such as food refusal and dawdling, consistent with the current evidence for approaches to early feeding management that promote the development of healthy food preferences and eating patterns. Legitimising and empowering care providers in their nutrition promotion role requires clear policies, guide lines, adequate pre- and in-service training, suitable parent materials, and monitoring.

Dwell-time and run-time control for DC mass rapid transit railways

Dwell times at stations and inter-station run times are the two major operational parameters to maintain train schedule in railway service. Current practices on dwell-time and run-time control are that they are only optimal with respect to certain nominal traffic conditions, but not necessarily the current service demand. The advantages of dwell-time and run-time control on trains are therefore not fully considered. The application of a dynamic programming approach, with the aid of an event-based model, to devise an optimal set of dwell times and run times for trains under given operational constraints over a regional level is presented. Since train operation is interactive and of multi-attributes, dwell-time and run-time coordination among trains is a multi-dimensional problem. The computational demand on devising trains' instructions, a prime concern in real-time applications, is excessively high. To properly reduce the computational demand in the provision of appropriate dwell times and run times for trains, a DC railway line is divided into a number of regions and each region is controlled by a dwell- time and run-time controller. The performance and feasibility of the controller in formulating the dwell-time and run-time solutions for real-time applications are demonstrated through simulations.

Coast control for mass rapid transit railways with searching methods

With daily commercial and social activity in cities, regulation of train service in mass rapid transit railways is necessary to maintain service and passenger flow. Dwell-time adjustment at stations is one commonly used approach to regulation of train service, but its control space is very limited. Coasting control is a viable means of meeting the specific run-time in an inter-station run. The current practice is to start coasting at a fixed distance from the departed station. Hence, it is only optimal with respect to a nominal operational condition of the train schedule, but not the current service demand. The advantage of coasting can only be fully secured when coasting points are determined in real-time. However, identifying the necessary starting point(s) for coasting under the constraints of current service conditions is no simple task as train movement is governed by a large number of factors. The feasibility and performance of classical and heuristic searching measures in locating coasting point(s) is studied with the aid of a single train simulator, according to specified inter-station run times.

Property damage crash equivalency factors to solve crash frequency-severity dilemma: Case study on South Korean rural roads

Safety interventions (e.g., median barriers, photo enforcement) and road features (e.g., median type and width) can influence crash severity, crash frequency, or both. Both dimensions—crash frequency and crash severity—are needed to obtain a full accounting of road safety. Extensive literature and common sense both dictate that crashes are not created equal, with fatalities costing society more than 1,000 times the cost of property damage crashes on average. Despite this glaring disparity, the profession has not unanimously embraced or successfully defended a nonarbitrary severity weighting approach for analyzing safety data and conducting safety analyses. It is argued here that the two dimensions (frequency and severity) are made available by intelligently and reliably weighting crash frequencies and converting all crashes to property-damage-only crash equivalents (PDOEs) by using comprehensive societal unit crash costs. This approach is analogous to calculating axle load equivalents in the prediction of pavement damage: for instance, a 40,000-lb truck causes 4,025 times more stress than does a 4,000-lb car and so simply counting axles is not sufficient. Calculating PDOEs using unit crash costs is the most defensible and nonarbitrary weighting scheme, allows for the simple incorporation of severity and frequency, and leads to crash models that are sensitive to factors that affect crash severity. Moreover, using PDOEs diminishes the errors introduced by underreporting of less severe crashes—an added benefit of the PDOE analysis approach. The method is illustrated with rural road segment data from South Korea (which in practice would develop PDOEs with Korean crash cost data).

Effects of transportation accessibility on residential property values: Application of spatial hedonic price model in Seoul, South Korea, metropolitan area

A number of studies have focused on estimating the effects of accessibility on housing values by using the hedonic price model. In the majority of studies, estimation results have revealed that housing values increase as accessibility improves, although the magnitude of estimates has varied across studies. Adequately estimating the relationship between transportation accessibility and housing values is challenging for at least two reasons. First, the monocentric city assumption applied in location theory is no longer valid for many large or growing cities. Second, rather than being randomly distributed in space, housing values are clustered in space—often exhibiting spatial dependence. Recognizing these challenges, a study was undertaken to develop a spatial lag hedonic price model in the Seoul, South Korea, metropolitan region, which includes a measure of local accessibility as well as systemwide accessibility, in addition to other model covariates. Although the accessibility measures can be improved, the modeling results suggest that the spatial interactions of apartment sales prices occur across and within traffic analysis zones, and the sales prices for apartment communities are devalued as accessibility deteriorates. Consistent with findings in other cities, this study revealed that the distance to the central business district is still a significant determinant of sales price.

Expected safety performance of rural signalized intersections in South Korea

Understanding the expected safety performance of rural signalized intersections is critical for (a) identifying high-risk sites where the observed safety performance is substantially worse than the expected safety performance, (b) understanding influential factors associated with crashes, and (c) predicting the future performance of sites and helping plan safety-enhancing activities. These three critical activities are routinely conducted for safety management and planning purposes in jurisdictions throughout the United States and around the world. This paper aims to develop baseline expected safety performance functions of rural signalized intersections in South Korea, which to date have not yet been established or reported in the literature. Data are examined from numerous locations within South Korea for both three-legged and four-legged configurations. The safety effects of a host of operational and geometric variables on the safety performance of these sites are also examined. In addition, supplementary tables and graphs are developed for comparing the baseline safety performance of sites with various geometric and operational features. These graphs identify how various factors are associated with safety. The expected safety prediction tables offer advantages over regression prediction equations by allowing the safety manager to isolate specific features of the intersections and examine their impact on expected safety. The examination of the expected safety performance tables through illustrated examples highlights the need to correct for regression-to-the-mean effects, emphasizes the negative impacts of multicollinearity, shows why multivariate models do not translate well to accident modification factors, and illuminates the need to examine road safety carefully and methodically. Caveats are provided on the use of the safety performance prediction graphs developed in this paper.

Across-country comparisons of selected infant and young child feeding indicators and associated factors in four South Asian countries

Background: Information on infant and young child feeding is widely available in Demographic and Health Surveys and National Family Health Surveys for countries in South Asia; however, infant and young child feeding indicators from these surveys have not been compared between countries in the region. Objective. To compare the key indicators of breastfeeding and complementary feeding and their determinants in children under 24 months of age between four South Asian countries. Methods: We selected data sets from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 2004, the India National Family Health Survey (NFHS-03) 2005–06, the Nepal Demographic and Health Survey 2006, and the Sri Lanka 2000 Demographic and Health Survey. Infant feeding indicators were estimated according to the key World Health Organization indicators. Results: Exclusive breastfeeding rates were 42.5% in Bangladesh, 46.4% in India, and 53.1% in Nepal. The rate of full breastfeeding ranged between 60.6% and 73.9%. There were no factors consistently associated with the rate of no exclusive breastfeeding across countries. Utilization of health services (more antenatal clinic visits) was associated with higher rates of exclusive breastfeeding in India but lower rates in Nepal. Delivery at a health facility was a negative determinant of exclusive breastfeeding in India. Postnatal contacts by Public Health Midwives were a positive factor in Sri Lanka. A considerable proportion of infants under 6 months of age had been given plain water, juices, or other nonmilk liquids. The rate of timely first suckling ranged from 23.5% in India to 56.3% in Sri Lanka. Delivery by cesarean section was found to be a consistent negative factor that delayed initiation of breastfeeding. Nepal reported the lowest bottle-feeding rate of 3.5%. Socioeconomically privileged mothers were found to have higher bottlefeeding rates in most countries. Conclusions: Infant and young child feeding practices in the South Asia region have not reached the expected levels that are required to achieve a substantial reduction in child mortality. The countries with lower rates of exclusive breastfeeding have a great potential to improve the rates by preventing infants from receiving water and water-based or other nonmilk liquids during the first 6 months of life.

Tamper evidence for heavy vehicle on board mass systems

On-board mass (OBM) monitoring devices on heavy vehicles (HVs) have been tested in a national programme jointly by Transport Certification Australia Limited and the National Transport Commission. The tests were for, amongst other parameters, accuracy and tamper-evidence. The latter by deliberately tampering with the signals from OBM primary transducers during the tests. The OBM feasibility team is analysing dynamic data recorded at the primary transducers of OBM systems to determine if it can be used to detect tamper events. Tamper-evidence of current OBM systems needs to be determined if jurisdictions are to have confidence in specifying OBM for HVs as part of regulatory schemes. An algorithm has been developed to detect tamper events. The results of its application are detailed here.

Community engagement and groundwater investigation in a rural/peri urban basaltic aquifier system, Tamborine Mountain, South East Queensland

The Tamborine Mt area is a popular residential and tourist area in the Gold Coast hinterland, SE Qld. The 15km2 area occurs on elevated remnant Tertiary Basalts of the Beechmont Group, which comprise a number of mappable flow units originally derived from the Tweed volcanic centre to the south. The older Albert Basalt (Tertiary), which underlies the Beechmont Basalt at the southern end of the investigation area, is thought to be derived from the Focal Peak volcanic centre to the south west. The Basalts contain a locally significant ‘un-declared’ groundwater resource, which is utilised by the Tamborine Mt community for: • domestic purposes to supplement rainwater tank supplies, • commercial scale horticulture and • commercial export off-Mountain for bottled water. There is no reticulated water supply, and all waste water is treated on-site through domestic scale WTPs. Rainforest and other riparian ecosystems that attract residents and tourist dollars to the area, are also reliant on the groundwater that discharges to springs and surface streams on and around the plateau. Issues regarding a lack of compiled groundwater information, groundwater contamination, and groundwater sustainability are being investigated by QUT, utilising funding provided by the Federal Government’s ‘Caring for our Country’ programme through SEQ Catchments Ltd. The objectives of the two year project, which started in April 2009, are to: • Characterise the nature and condition of groundwater / surface water systems in the Tamborine Mountain area in terms of the issues being raised; • Engage and build capacity within the community to source local knowledge, encourage participation, raise awareness and improve understanding of the impacts of land and water use; • Develop a stand-alone 3D Visualisation model for dissemination into the community and use as a communication tool.

On-board mass monitoring of heavy vehicles : results of testing program

The Transport Certification Australia on-board mass feasibility project is testing various on-board mass devices in a range of heavy vehicles (HVs). Extensive field tests of on-board mass measurement systems for HVs have been conducted during 2008. These tests were of accuracy, robustness and tamper-evidence of heavy vehicle on-board mass telematics. All the systems tested showed accuracies within approximately +/- 500 kg of gross combination mass or approximately +/- 2% of the attendant weighbridge reading. Analysis of the dynamic data also showed encouraging results and has raised the possibility of use of such dynamic information in tamper evidence in two areas. This analysis was to determine if the use of averaged dynamic data could identify potential tampering or incorrect operating procedures as well as the possibility of dynamic measurements flagging a tamper event by the use of metrics including a tampering index (TIX). Technical and business options to detect tamper events will now be developed during implementation of regulatory OBM system application to Australian heavy vehicles (HVs).

Sustainable urban infrastructure development in south east Asia : evidence from Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore

Many South East Asian cities have experienced substantial physical, economic and social transformations during the past several decades. The rapid pace of globalisation and economic restructuring has resulted in these cities receiving the full impact of urbanisation pressures. In an attempt to ease these pressures, cities such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur have advocated growth management approaches focussing especially on urban infrastructure sustainability. These approaches aim to achieve triple bottom line sustainability by balancing economic and social development, and environmental protection. This chapter evaluates three Asia-Pacific city cases, Singapore, Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur, and assesses their experiences in managing their urban forms and infrastructure whilst promoting sustainable patterns of urban development.

A regulatory on-board mass monitoring application for heavy vehicles in Australia

This paper reports on the development of specifications for an on-board mass monitoring (OBM) application for regulatory requirements in Australia. An earlier paper reported on feasibility study and pilot testing program prior to the specification development [1]. Learnings from the pilot were used to refine this testing process and a full scale testing program was conducted from July to October 2008. The results from the full scale test and evidentiary implications are presented in this report. The draft specification for an evidentiary on-board mass monitoring application is currently under development.

Introduction : the South Asia Infant Feeding Research Network (SAIFRN)

The South Asia Infant Feeding Research Network (SAIFRN) was established in 2007 to foster and coordinate a research partnership among South Asian and international research groups interested in infant and young child feeding. SAIFRN has brought together a mix of researchers and program managers from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka together with international partners from Australia. As the first activity, SAIFRN conducted a series of analyses using Demographic and Health Surveys of Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka and the National Family Health Survey of India. The results highlight that most indicators of infant and young child feeding in these four countries have not reached the targeted levels. The rates vary considerably by country, and the factors associated with poor feeding practices were not always consistent across countries. Driven by the ultimate goal of improved child survival in the region, SAIFRN wishes to expand its partnerships with governmental and nongovernmental organizations that share common interests both within and outside the South Asia region. In the future, SAIFRN hopes to provide more opportunities to researchers in the region to improve their skills by participating in capacity-building programs in collaboration with international partner institutions, and looks forward to liaising with potential donors to support such activities.

The application of public asset management in Indonesian local government : a case study in South Sulawesi Province

Purpose To identify the challenges faced by local government in Indonesia when adopting a Public Asset Management Framework. Design A Case Study in South Sulawesi Provincial Government was used as the approach to achieving the research objective. The case study involved two data collection techniques - interviews and document analysis. Findings The result of the study indicates there are significant challenges that the Indonesian local government need to manage when adopting a public asset management framework. Those challenges are: absence of an institutional and legal framework to support the asset management application; non-profit principle of public assets; multiple jurisdictions involved in the public asset management processes; the complexity of local government objectives; unavailability of data for managing public property; and limited human resources. Research Limitation This research is limited to one case study. It is a preliminary study from larger research that uses multiple case studies. The main research also investigates opportunities for local government by adopting and implementing public asset management. Originality/Value Findings from this study provide useful input for the policy makers, academics and asset management practitioners in Indonesia to establish a public asset management framework resulting in efficient and effective organizations, as well as an increase of public services quality. This study has a potential application for other developing countries.

Proactive communication management beats hostile media exposure : training for multi-cultural community leaders in living with mass media

Proactive communication management instead of mortification in the glare of hostile media attention became the theme of a four-day training program for multi-cultural community leaders, the object of this research. The program in Brisbane from December 2009 through to February this year was conducted under auspices of a Community Media Link grant program shared by Griffith University and the Queensland Ethnic Communities Council, together with Journalism academics from the Queensland University of Technology. Twenty-eight participants from 23 organisations took part, with a team of nine facilitators from the host organisations, and guest presenters from the news media. This paper reviews the process, taking into account: its objectives, to empower participants by showing how Australian media operate and introducing participants to journalists; pedagogical thrust, where overview talks, with role play seminars with guest presenters from the media, were combined with practice in interviews and writing for media; and outcomes, assessed on the basis of participants’ responses. The research methodology is qualitative, in that the study is based on discussions to review the planning and experience of sessions, and anonymous, informal feed-back questionnaires distributed to the participants. Background literature on multiculturalism and community media was referred to in the study. The findings indicate positive outcomes for participants from this approach to protection of persons unversed in living in the Australian “mediatised” environment. Most affirmed that the “production side” perspective of the exercise had informed and motivated them effectively, such that henceforth they would venture far more into media management, in their community leadership roles.