This webinar is part of the Rural Health Webinar Series in November 2024.
Rural American adults have higher rates of chronic physical activity-related illness and are less active than their urban counterparts, with less than 20% meeting U.S. physical activity guidelines of 150-300 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity per week. Walking is the most common form of physical activity and people who walk are more likely to meet physical activity guidelines. However, rural adults walk significantly less compared with their urban counter parts. Group walking programs are an effective, evidence-based approach to promote walking for health; however, there is a lack of capacity in rural communities to deliver such programs.
To address this gap, guest speaker Cynthia Perry, PhD, MSN adapted an evidence-based guide for delivering group-based walking programs for cancer survivors and their friends and family, Step It Up! Survivors, and provided capacity building (technical assistance and small grant funding), to 8 Oregon community organizations to implement Step It Up! Survivors. All organizations successfully held at least one weekly walking group for six months with 258 unique walking group members and a weekly median of 12 participants per walking group.
Perry and her team built on this study to expand reach and build capacity with rural libraries in Oregon. Eighteen rural Oregon libraries agreed to be part of a study comparing the effects of a group walking program, Step It Up versus Step It Up plus a civic engagement program, Change Club, aimed at enhancing walkability, to improve physical activity in rural adults. The libraries were randomized to deliver one of the two programs. The librarians enrolled 330 participants (average of 18 participants per library) who committed to being in a two-year program and research study. In this webinar, preliminary findings and implementation outcomes from this ongoing two-year study will be presented.
As a result of attending this presentation, learners will be able to:
- Describe program implementation planning for delivery of walking programs.
- Describe planning and managing data collection procedures within rural libraries.
By registering for this class, you are agreeing to the NNLM Code of Conduct.
Speaker bio:
Cynthia Perry is the Elizabeth N Gray Distinguished Professor at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) School of Nursing in Portland, Oregon. She holds a PhD in nursing science from OHSU, MSN for family nurse practitioner from Yale, and BA in anthropology from Northwestern. Her research focuses on physical activity promotion across the lifespan as an avenue to reducing health disparities. For over a decade she has been working within rural and Latino communities using community-based participatory research to develop and adapt physical activity interventions that are meaningful and sustainable and has evaluated them with mixed methods analyses. She also has expertise in dissemination and implementation research of public health programming in rural communities. She works with national multidisciplinary research teams and networks in addition to local communities. She is a family nurse practitioner (FNP) and has practiced as an FNP (1990-2018) in various settings including rural Oregon and Alaska. She was named the Yale School of Nursing Distinguished Alumni in 2017. Dr. Perry is a fellow of the American Heart Association.