Análise da implementação das políticas públicas para prevenção e redução da obesidade no Estado do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

Considered major public health problems, obesity and chronic non-communicable diseases are the main causes of death and disability today and are at the center of scientific discussions. Public policies (PP) are needed to tackle these problems. The level of implementation of public policies in the state of Rio de Janeiro to prevent and control obesity was analyzed using the INFORMAS/Food-EPI protocol. The protocol consists of a component related to policies and another related to institutionality, subdivided into seven and six domains respectively. The evaluation process took place in six stages: (1) adaptation of the tool to the local level; (2) comprehensive review of actions and PPs related to the topic; (3) validation with experts; (4) comparison of local actions with international best practices and assessment of their level of implementation; (5) selection of a set of actions to improve current PPs and (6) prioritization of the proposals considering their importance and feasibility. The results show that the domains that stood out most with associated actions were food provision (20.5%) and monitoring and evaluation (13.6%). As for the level of implementation of policies for healthier food environments, 2.8% (n=1) were classified as “very low”, 52.8% (n=19) as “low” implementation, 27.8% (n=10) as “medium” implementation, while only 16.6% (n=6) of the actions were considered to have a “high level” of implementation. Most of the proposals offered by the experts were located in the policy component (n=44). The proposals chosen as most feasible by the experts were concentrated in the policy component. Evaluating the implementation of policies could help to improve and plan policies and actions, as well as proposing ways to improve food environments in Rio de Janeiro in order to make progress in tackling obesity.