MOVE24 - Dissemination, Monitoring and Surveillance of the Portuguese 24-Hour Movement Guidelines: making the whole day matter.

Summary:

Our research group, led by the principal investigator Rute Santos, has begun to develop the Portuguese 24h Integrated Movement Guidelines (24hMG) (i.e., guidelines for sleep, sedentary behavior and physical activity over a 24h day) for the different age groups. The 24hMG will serve as a basis for future public health surveillance and provide practical information for clinicians, researchers and general population. As the 24hMG project progresses it is vital to make research results reachable and understandable to the end-users.

The Knowledge Translation Plan (KTP) needs to be set up at the same time as the 24h-MG project is being carried out, to avoid losing opportunities to optimize guidelines uptake. Past experience with guidelines development has shown that purposeful efforts to its KTP were often not pursued until after the guidelines were complete; such discontinued process resulted in lost opportunities to optimize guidelines uptake, wasted intellectual and financial resources and hampered changes in population levels of movement behaviors (MovBeh). As the 24hMG for the different age groups are launched and its complete KT is carried out, new or adapted measurement instruments or additional survey items will be needed to ensure guideline adherence and MovBeh levels can be determined; preliminary evidence from the 24h-MG systematic reviews shows that there are currently no self-reported instruments to assess MovBeh in an integrated way. Therefore, there is a need to develop a set of valid instruments specifically designed to assess MovBeh levels, that can be used in epidemiological studies and clinical practice, in Portugal and internationally.

Such need aligns with the WHO Physical Activity Strategy for the European Region 2016-25, and with the WHO Global action plan on Physical Activity for 2018-2030. These WHO documents also highlight the need to generate data on 24h MovBeh, trends and its association with other health outcomes, that encourages research, drives action and evaluates public health policies, in a systematic manner. A pragmatic approach to collect such data is through public registries and data pooling.

This proposal represents an afterthought and a complement to the ongoing 24hMG project and AIMS to:

• develop a complete KT plan;
• create self-reported and proxy-report instruments to determine 24hMG compliance;
• pilot an International public health registry of 24h MovBeh and data pooling.