Catching up with Robin Shook, Ph.D., Children’s Mercy Kansas City
By Kelly Hale , Marketing & Communications Specialist
Jun 04, 2024
When Robin Shook, Ph.D., started working on his 2022 Lauren S. Aaronson Pilot Award project, he wanted to find ways to help promote healthy lifestyles in children. This included working with primary care providers to recommend various programs around a six-county area around Kansas City (Wyandotte and Johnson in Kansas, and Platte, Cass, Clay, and Jackson in Missouri). As part of the project, the team also set out to identify programs and organizations that promote physical activity. The thought was there would be around 1,000 organizations.
To date, he and his team have identified nearly 5,000 organizations. Shook, who partnered with the University of Missouri-Kansas City to help identify the organizations, wants to work with clinical providers to refer patients and families to community resources that get youth involved in physical activities and excited about leading healthy lifestyles.
“We’re hoping to have a comprehensive understanding of what youth sports are like in KC and how that integrates with overall physical activity opportunities,” Shook said.
Shook recently received a funding award from The Kansas City Royals Foundation to do an in-depth analysis of a subset of the KC Metro organizations to better understand the specifics of the programs. He is also going to create a repository for public use so that families can search for organizations that best fit their interests. You can read more about this project here.
In addition to identifying these organizations, Shook and his team also recognize the need to ensure equitable access to programming. So far, he has found that certain counties have a much higher proportion of programs than others. Shook wants to make sure that all children and families from across the KC Metro have access to a similar variety of high-quality programs.
Finally, Shook hopes that this work will rejuvenate primary care providers’ interest in asking patients about their physical activity and referring them to community programs as appropriate.
The goal of his work is to provide a repository for the public to access all the programs available in their area that help promote a healthy lifestyle or physical activity.
Kelly Hale
Marketing & Communications Specialist
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