School Health

Name of the activity: School Health

Country/NMO: Iraq (IFMSA-Iraq)

Program: Healthy Lifestyles & Non-Communicable Diseases

Contact information: [email protected]

Type of the activity: Education. Education on health issues for specific societal groups, either in the form of projects (set of tasks for a certain group over a fixed period of time), events (something notable that happens) or conferences (form meeting about ideas related to a particular topic, usually over several days).

General description:

school health project targeting youth in schools of all ages. All things learnt in such a young age will be lifelong!

Each event is tailored to fit gender,age & other considerations. each school may be a target for the event two or three times in the term.

subjects presented by data-show are chosen by the team taking into consideration school staff and parental requests.

pr-event workshops and training are delivered to members participated in the event,so they will be more efficient in delivering medical information & dealing with students.

School health builds students’ knowledge& skills, raising awareness about diseases, bad habits, smoking, drug abuse, mental&emotional health, nutrition, obesity, physical activity, hygiene, screening of some cancers, with the involvement of families & teachers in this.

60% an avergae changes occured in students’ lifestyle.

We are maintaining contact with them including their schools & families,to keep us updated about the changes in their lives.

Focus area:

All of above include:( prevention of NCDs, Tobacco prevention, children and teens healthy habits)

Problem statement:

Because the new generations is the base of the community, School Health project is very important to change all bad habits and to raise awareness about different diseases as it could as it possible.

Smoking among secondary school students, that is highly increasing among teens due to psychological problems as bullying or to feel that they will become stronger. Others like obesity due to increase of eating fast food and soft-drinks, this leads to have NCDs in future.

Target groups:

General population, Medical students, Other Students, Children, Youth, Women, Elderly people, children and adolescents in schools

Beneficiaries:

General population, Medical students, Other Students, Doctors, Youth, Women, Elderly people

Objectives and indicators of success:

The topics discussed are healthy lifestyle including nutrition and mental&physical health and raising awerness about some NCDs, peer pressure, hygiene &bad habits as smoking& tattooing.In collaboration with CBD, working on time management skills,critical thinking &problem solving.Sessions are designed to be suitable for the age group.

*for the above,the success indicators are:

-Pre & post sessions feedback surveys for school staff &parents.These surveys focus on student’s habits &daily routine.About 40% of smokers got rid from smoking &they become effectible on their relatives& friends.

-By contacting with many schools, they told us that children become washing their hands before meal such as in Karada, so they become more hygienic.

-Because of our positive energy lectures, we are contacting with many students especially girls who exposed to bully or autoimmune diseases&telling us how to fight these problems as in girl with systemic lupus erythromatous.

-By contacting with many parents& teachers about how marks of students changed to be better. Also changes in their healthy lifestyle.

– screening many diseases and treat them as in HPV common warts in Karada primary school.

Methodology:

Our strategy is by focusing on the members involved.

by pre-event workshops for members participating in school health project, these involves training on NCD,healthy

lifestyle,healthy food,dental& mental health and many other subjects. Also by training them about how to deal with kids & teens, how to deliver the information in an easy and funny way and attract their attention.

in schools, many of kids are from families that have poor knowledge on many important health matters,so it is like spreading the knowledge and inspire others too.

in high schools and among teens, smoking,drugs and other habits that may be part of bad peer pressure are also addressed and discussed.Lectures presented by Data-show presentation. Also questionaires done in the first & second vist for each school.

links and contacts information are provided for the principal,teachers, kids& teens too,so they can be in touch with us after the event to insure that our event in school will be more impactful.

Plans for evaluation:

We are working on analyzing the data gathered from schools

pre and post project surveys to know more about community knowledge when it comes to their health.

Creating research like data in which future events will depend on the data gathered to focus on a subject more than the other.

The project also aim to connect schools & students together creating a network of young health educators in community.

Since these data contains no personal information ,they are computerized and saved ,ready to be used in public health researches. aslo by Getting contact with students online in Social medical group,They can see our medical videos and events.

Until now many students have contacted us,telling us how they changed their lives to be healthier. Many teens got rid of the smoking habit, also in many primary schools and kindergarten ,children are paying more attention to hand washing

Until now, we reached about more than 20,000 students in these schools nationwide.