June 1, 2017, Chapel Hill, NC – Go NAPSACC announced today the launch of a new suite of tools designed to give state and regional administrators as well as child care technical assistance (TA) consultants tools to more effectively support child care providers in improving their programs’ nutrition and physical activity environments. The new tools make it easier than ever for administrators and TA consultants to guide, track, and report on the progress of their child care programs using the Go NAPSACC Toolkit.
TA consultants and administrators now have direct access to the Go NAPSACC tips & materials library. The new tools also offer a more detailed view of each program’s recent Go NAPSACC activities, with the added benefit of allowing TA consultants to log their time and make notes about appointments. With just a few clicks, administrators and TA consultants can create a report summarizing where their programs stand compared to the Go NAPSACC best practices. They can even track their progress as they continue to use the program. This streamlined tracking and reporting functionality makes it easy for TA consultants to capture and report on the changes programs have worked hard to achieve and enables state administrators to more accurately evaluate activities in their region.
“I’m so proud of the team and what we’ve created,” says Dianne Stanton Ward, EdD, Principal Investigator for the NAPSACC program and Director of the Children’s Healthy Weight Research Group. “As we continue in our efforts to improve practices and environments for children in early care, we need consider the needs of all of the people in the layers of the child care environment. It’s been through the support from our funder, the BlueCross and BlueShield of North Carolina Foundation that we’ve been able to bring NAPSACC online and reach over 20,000 children in North Carolina. I’m confident that the new tools will help us reach a great deal more.”
While Go NAPSACC can be a self-guided process for child care providers, the team recognizes the important supporting role that consultants play. “We listened to what our users wanted and built tools on the site to meet their needs,” explains Margaret Stebelton, MPH, Go NAPSACC Project Manager. “We worked with consultants here in North Carolina to review the tools throughout the development process, to ensure that we were giving them functionality that they can use.”
“The tools have been very well received in our trainings,” reports Ellie Morris, MPH, Go NAPSACC Education & Outreach Coordinator. “Administrators and Consultants all love the new reports. It’s very rewarding to see how much they appreciate all of our work.”