Abstract
The main aim of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is to defend the health of low-income women, infants, and youngsters up to age five who are at nutritious risk, by giving foods that are nutritious to supplement their diets, nutrition learning, and recommendations to health care and other social services. The WIC program offers a short-term plan to assist pregnant women during the first five years of the infant’s life. The main aim of the program is to assist youngsters to have easy access to the right start in life through the provision of a programmed amount of nutritionally-sounded food for mothers and children every month. The program aims at ensuring proper and healthy eating among the vulnerable groups of youngsters and women. The program is founded on the principle that initial involvement programs during serious times of growing and development can assist in the prevention of future medical and developing issues. The WIC program is unique and differs from other social programs because it is a federal grant program provided by the Food and Nutrition Services to women and children of the low-income. This report will discuss the WIC program in detail. The first part will present the history of the special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children, and all the issues in the program. The report will also show the role of political, social, legislative, and economic factors in curbing the issues related to the WIC program.
Special supplemental nutrition program
The Special Supplemental Nutrition Platform for Women, Infants, and Youngsters ensures the continuous provision of nutritious food supplementation, screening, nutrition training, and education and referral to health and social services to expectant mothers, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding post-delivery women, and newborns and children up to five years of age. The program also supports the initiation and continuation of breastfeeding among postpartum women who choose to breastfeed. This program aims at improving fetal growth and development, improving the health and development of infants and young children, increases access to needed services. With this program, there has been a great expansion since the commencement in 1972. This program is mainly meant for low-income pregnant and post-partum women, and children of up to five years, which are a nutritional risk. WIC delivers certain healthy foods to complement the dietary needs of partakers to warrant good health and growth. WIC helps to reduce premature births, low infant death, improve the quality of diet, and also the immunization rates. This report will present a historical review of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for women, infants, and Children, showing how viewpoints about the issue have changed. The paper will also discuss the social, political, legislative, and economic factors and how they have shaped the way the issue was and is viewed.
Historical review of the program
The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Newborns, and Youngsters (WIC) was developed in 1972 by a change to the 1966 Child Nutrition Act. It developed into a long-lasting platform in 1974 due to the rising civic apprehension of multi-nutrition among low-income mothers and children. In 1969, the USDA developed the Commodity Supplemental Food Program that aimed at providing comedies to help feed the low-income pregnant mothers, infants, and children of up to five years of age. However, the developed program was not providing the required food assistance because it was not meeting the special need s of pregnant women and infants. A group of physicians come together and described young women that were often expectant in their clinics with various ailments that were caused by a lack of food. The physicians developed a plan to help build food commissionaires attached to neighborhood clinics that would be stocked with food. Doctors had the responsibility of prescribing the required foods. The prescription was serving as a voucher that the women would take to the commissary to attain a food package. Later, the first USDA commissary program was developed in Atlanta, GA.16 self-sufficiently; another voucher program to dispense foods in a Baltimore, MD, neighborhood was developed. In 1972, amendments occurred leading to the establishment of the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children.
The program assists nutritionally at-risk expectant, breastfeeding, and postnatal women, infants, and children of up to five years, providing extra nutritious food and nutrition education and recommendations to social and health services. According to to…. WIC is the most cost-effective program that helps to protect and improve the health and nutritional status of participants. The WIC program is a federally sponsored program managed by the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) of USDA. The program is however not executed consistently countrywide. Each WSA is distinctly accountable for conveying food packages that are constant with the WIC contributor’s suitability class and for delivering WIC food instruments, like the coupons, to participants for improvement at sanctioned stores. The Items in the state food list must content state guidelines. Participants must meet three eligibility criteria for them to fully participate in the WIC program. They must be members of at least one of the groups like that of a group of pregnant women that are up to six weeks after delivery, breastfeeding women up to one year after delivery, infants, and children of up to five years. The applicants must demonstrate, through the evaluation of health experts, which they are at nutritional risk as per the federal rules. These risks can depend on a nutrition-related medical condition, dietary deficiencies, and unhealthy behavior like alcohol or drug abuse, or circumstances that can cause risks like homelessness. Residential eligibility is also important- it requires the WIC applicants who reside within the state where they develop eligibility and receive benefits. Income is another eligibility that requires the family income of WIC applicants to meet certain rules.
In the late 1980s, there was the commencement of an increased emphasis on breastfeeding promotion and support in WIC. Due to the increasing concern about bout the reduced rates of breastfeeding among the WIC mothers, the congress mandated up to eight million dollars to be used for the breastfeeding promotions support activities and allow for the usage of the administrative funds that will help in purchasing of the breastfeeding aids. There have been issues that are related to the misuse of the program funds and violation of program rules and policies, which increased as the WIC program expanded. There have been legislative and regulatory actions that have been undertaken to strengthen the integrity and transparency of the program. The WIC applicants are required by the act to be present and document their income if they were not adjunctively income-eligible founded on registration in other specific programs and also provide evidence of position.
Over the years, there has been an increase in the participation and cost of the WIC program to the state, which has also risen melodramatically. The increase has happened due to the rise in the total program costs that are due to the increasing number of participants that the program serves. There has also been a decrease in the price per individual of the WIC food set. WIC breastfeeding tolls, even though refining, remain to be considerably lesser than the Fit Individuals 2010 mark recognized by the Health and Human service in the USA. There have been numerous alterations since 1989 made to the WIC Platform to upsurge the rates of breastfeeding. The Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 1989 earmarked 8 million dollars per year to be used by the WIC program to help in the promotion of breastfeeding. WIC State Agencies were obligated to employ a breastfeeding promotion director, teach local agency staff on the importance of breastfeeding, and organize promotion with platforms in the Public. An improved WIC food package was recognized in 1992 for women who solely breastfeed their babies.
Childhood obesity and overweight is another issue with direct implication on the health of the participants of the program. The WIC program was developed to help reduce the issue of malnutrition and hunger among Americans with low incomes. Over the past years, overweight and obesity have continued to the most critical health issues in the USA. The research conducted by……. Shows that more than one-third of all grown-ups, twelve percent of teenagers, and fourteen percent of youngsters six to eleven years old are overweight and the prevalence of overweight is growing. Overweight and obesity among kids is a concern because overweight children are likely to become overweight adults, and there is a clear connotation between overweight and obesity in adults and chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and hypertension. There have been different criteria for overweight that are used to estimate the prevalence the heart diseases. Because newborns and infants are in an active state of development in which body size is repeatedly in a state of fluidity, it is hard to allocate a solitary limit value to an age choice
Over the years, there has been an increasing amount of youngsters taking part in the WIC program who are obese or overweight is increasing. According to current research of low-income kindergarten teenagers in eighteen Countries who partook in numerous openly sponsored health and nutrition platforms, one out of ten youngsters in these programs was obese. That is an upsurge of twenty percent from 1983. It is not astonishing that there would be an increased occurrence of overweight among WIC partakers because overweight is one of the anthropometric nutrition risk measures adapted to help identify the validity of a program. For a specified contestant set, which includes the women, infant, and children, the highest significance is given to individuals representing medically founded nutrition risks, like the anthropometric risks such as for overweight. The upsurge in overweight among WIC children may be an indication of the rise in overweight among the overall population of kids. One of the main goals of the nutrition learning counseling delivered by WIC is to assist the infants and children attain suggested rates of expansion and development by highlighting food selections that are of high nutritional quality while evading needless foods that are rich in calories and stressing on physical activities and exercise that are age-appropriate thus reducing additional risks related to the augmented babyhood obesity. The WIC platform can also assist persons with medical problems to to attain prompt analysis and treatment by healthiness specialists over its health recommendation function ()
Role of social, political, legislative and economic factors in the VIC program
The USDA plays a very important role in the VIC program. The body is dedicated to solidifying the efforts to promote and support breastfeeding for better health outcomes because mother’s milk is the normative typical for newborn feeding and nutrition and given that about one-half of all American-born preschoolers who are registered with the WIC program. The USDA has undertaken various national breastfeeding activities, which is a reflection of its future efforts in promoting breastfeeding and support to safeguard the health of the mothers and their newborns. There have been various established legislative and programmatic initiatives that are sued by the USDA to promote and support breastfeeding in the WIC program. For instance, the government established the Breastfeeding Promotion Consortium to promote the breastfeeding movement at the local and state level. Up to now, the movement still operates effectively and consists of twenty-five members from health expertise, public health, advocacy organizations, and the government.
The Breastfeeding Promotion Consortium collaboratively mail role is to ensure the promotion of breastfeeding as the normative customary of babies’ nutrition and youngster growth. It works towards achieving works achieving the Healthy People 2020 breastfeeding goals, and supports it because it is the main priority for the overall public.
There has been a creation of the national breast feeding promotions program by the USDA, which is a requirement of The Homeless Children Nutrition Improvement, to help in the raising of a broader public recognition of breast feeding in the United States. Also, the established legislation approved an improved food package to meet the exceptional health and nutritious requirements of entirely breast feeding mothers. The package of food provided higher amount of cheese, juice, and dry beans. Carrots and tuna are also added as new food items to encourage and support breast feeding mothers. The USDA, over the subsequent years has worked to enhance efforts to develop breast feeding commencement and extent rates by providing WIC agencies with directions and any required technical aid to encourage and support breast feeding. The body also established a campaign known as the Loving Support campaign, which was based on social marketing approach. The campaign emphasized on the concept of the social ecological Model which explains that the support of relatives, associates, the health care system, and the communities are all vital for successful breastfeeding of a mother.
The federal law has also ensured that the WIC state agencies get into cost-containment agreements for the purchase of the infant based formula used in the WIC. Food selection by some of the WIC state agencies have been limited to the lowest cost, restriction of the numbers of vendors has also been undertaken to ensure that the price charged are competitive. There has been expansion of WIC programs that offer teaching and practical aid to help the WIC government agencies in establishing inclusive community founded breast feeding partnership. The government and other legal bodies offer resources to increase the breast feeding commencement and duration amounts among the African American women by including fathers. There is teaching offered to support the WIC state and local agencies in executing and augmenting peer psychotherapy platforms. The gears to communicate a loving association between a lactating mother, the infant and family memberships in the community get a chance to be enrolled in the WIC. Manager give update teaching on important aspect of managing peer psychotherapy programs.
Conclusion
WIC has continues to expand since its establishment. There has been increased funding to the program thus allowing an increased participation Various legislative and regulatory actions undertaken have encouraged innovations like the infant formula rebates which has assisted in the shaping and refining the WIC program as it grows. The program has been a gateway for the low-income families to have an easy access to the public health system. The WIC program however is faced with various problems as raised by the researchers, the program managers and policy makers. Researchers should conduct additional research to identify the optimal ways of running the WIC program to easily achieve the needs of the needs of the participants of the program.