Office on Women's Health

— filed under: Case Study, Health

National Women's Health Week (NWHW) is a household name thanks to earned coverage in media outlets such as SHAPE, Fitness, CNN, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe and collaborations with national groups such as iVillage Network and Estée Lauder.

One of several initiatives Hager Sharp supports for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office on Women's Health (OWH), NWHW educates and empowers women to be drivers of their own health. The week also kicks off the WOMAN Challenge, an eight-week physical activity challenge, which boasts more than 40,000 registrants in just three years.

BodyWorks, OWH's innovative train-the-trainer childhood obesity prevention program targeted at parents, has seen immense growth under Hager Sharp's leadership. More than 2,100 trainers and 1,000 parents and caregivers have completed the 10-session program. Hager Sharp provides ongoing program management, partnership outreach and development, technical assistance and media and promotions, and it supports trainer resource, Web site content and materials development. Coverage of BodyWorks has run in consumer and health care professional publications including Reuters, the Chicago Tribune, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Pediatric News.

OWH chose Hager Sharp to revamp and re-launch its national bone health campaign, a behavior change campaign encouraging girls ages 9 to 14 to strengthen their bones through increased calcium and vitamin D consumption and physical activity. Hager Sharp launched the new campaign, called Best Bones Forever!, in September 2009 with a new name, logo and design, Web site, materials and promotion strategies as well as three community-level interventions aimed at affecting behavior change throughout the 2009-2010 school year. These pilot programs, which take place in North Las Vegas, NV, Pinal County, AZ and Ulster County, NY, are tasked with building and executing in-depth bone health activities that engage the entire community, with a special focus on adolescent girls and their parents. To help develop and promote the campaign, Hager Sharp has enlisted a variety of partners, from health organizations such as the National Osteoporosis Foundation to sports associations such as USA Volleyball to corporate partners such as Cabot Creamery.

In 2005, OWH contracted with Hager Sharp to evaluate several of its health education materials and publications. Hager Sharp facilitated focus groups and surveys about OWH materials in order to determine how and how much they were being used, if they resonated with the target population and their potential capacity to impact knowledge, attitudes, skills and behaviors. The results of the evaluations provide OWH with key insights into their materials and target audiences, help OWH to make improvements and demonstrate that time, effort and resources are well spent on OWH publications.