A University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine research group working to prevent chronic disease by advocating healthy behaviors may be forced to shut down half of its social service programs this year when its grant funding expires.
The group has been funded by government grants affected by the recent federal spending cuts known as sequestration. The group, known as the Health Behavior Change Research Workgroup, is seeking private funding to prevent the closure of half of its 10 community intervention programs, which address issues including childhood obesity, cancer, oral health and substance abuse.
“We’re running on a shoestring budget. … Essentially the projects are at risk of not being continued,” said Claudio Nigg, the group’s director, who has been working on these projects for 12 years. “The funding climate right now is extremely tough. Our interest would be to look for institutions and individuals that would think that investing in child or older adult health is worth it.”
One project, which started in 2003 and ends this year, trains after-school program leaders to incorporate physical education and healthful eating to reach between 20,000 and 25,000 public school children across the state. Another offers free dental checkups, including teeth cleaning, for about 100 low-income elementary school children at eight schools under the Minoaka Program, also expiring at year’s end. The group also works with Waipahu High School seniors under the Health Action Research Training project, teaching them how to collect data and come up with a curriculum to teach their peers in 11th grade how to improve physical activity and nutrition. The program, which started about three years ago, ends this summer.
“We’re developing the next generation of researchers,” Nigg said. “They run the project and they promote obesity prevention. This is peer education.”
Over more than a decade, the social service programs have received roughly $35 million either directly or as part of other projects. The group formed a nonprofit two years ago after more researchers joined. Now it has roughly 20 researchers and an annual budget of between $400,000 and $500,000. The budget covers 10 projects that primarily target schools with a higher population of low-income students.
Several years ago the group trained teachers in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands on active physical education for about 10,000 kindergarten-to-12th-grade students at a cost of about $200,000.
“If you can actually impact an entire nation, that’s a huge obvious benefit,” Nigg said. “That’s an entire generation that you’re impacting. But we couldn’t keep that going. Funding is a continuous challenge for us.”
The group has obtained grants from the National Institutes of Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and HMSA Foundation and has worked closely with the state Department of Health to study health behaviors in an effort to prevent chronic illnesses.
NIH, the group’s main funder, now accepts only about 7 percent of all grants submitted, meaning researchers must submit 10 proposals to get one grant, Nigg said. About a decade ago NIH funded about 20 percent of grant proposals.
“Why would an individual or business look at this and be interested in it? The health care cost of obesity, diabetes is skyrocketing,” Nigg said. “In 10 to 20 years the health care system by some projections is going to be bankrupt, so we really need to think and act in targeting prevention in a serious and large-scale way. We have some individuals that are obese kids. Then as teenagers they’ve got to worry about diabetes, and in their early 20s they’ve got to worry about amputations. That’s obviously a long-term high-cost issue because someone who has got diabetes when they’re 15 or so is going to depend on the health care system for a long time. That’s a very expensive proposition.”
For more information, go to www.manoa.hawaii.edu/hbcr, email cnigg@hawaii.edu or call 956-2862.
