Background
INFECTIOUS DISEASE TRANSMISSION
Engaging children in adequate physical activity in early childhood is associated with many physical and psychosocial benefits [The Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) setting has been identified as an important setting to support and promote child physical activity, as it provides access to a large proportion of young children aged 3–5 years old (approximately 90% world-wide) [One way of facilitating greater time outdoors to increase physical activity and reduce risk of infectious disease transmission in the ECEC setting may include introducing ‘indoor-outdoor’ (continuous/free-flow) free play routines, where children are able to move freely between the indoor and outdoor environments and choose where they wish to play, increasing the total time available for outdoor free play [Dissemination has been defined as an “active approach of spreading evidence-based interventions or knowledge to the target audience via determined communication channels using planned strategies” [With the emergence of COVID-19 and rapidly changing health and social contexts, the importance of understanding how to quickly disseminate guideline recommendations to ECEC services in a resource-efficient and time-effective manner was identified, and provided an opportunity to assess the impact of strategies to disseminate health-related information to the sector.As such, the aim of this 3-arm randomised controlled trial was to examine the use of different types of dissemination strategies: (i) an e-newsletter; and (ii) an animated video resource, compared with the provision of a standard email (passive diffusion), to assess the impact on increasing ECEC service intentions to adopt an indoor-outdoor program for the full day and offer more time outdoors. The e-newsletter and animated video formats were chosen as the dissemination resources as both are easily distributed via email, at scale, and are delivered via the same modality (email) as the control message. It was hypothesised that more targeted, engaging dissemination strategies (e.g. the e-newsletter or animated video resource) would increase ECEC service intentions to adopt the Guidelines relative to a passive standard email (control).