Skip to main content

Building a Healthier Future Through School Health Programs

Despite the state of Uttar Pradesh having one of the worst health indices in the country, its dynamic Chief Minister, Akhilesh Yadav has been quick and far-sighted to realise that the key to setting things right in the long run may not lie in just building expensive hospitals, but supplementing it with creating health-consciousness in the minds of its young citizen so that they refrain from picking up risky habits and do not fall prey to preventable diseases.

In India, school is where several million young people spend around 6 hours of time each day for up to 13 years of their lives, providing a unique setting not just to impart scholastic education, but raise awareness on health issues that could impact their health and that of the nation.

In an unusually progressive step that matches what occurs in developed nations, Uttar Pradesh has become the first state to introduce health awareness as a component in its school curriculum. Based on the WHO concept of “school health promotion”, it has introduced a book called “ Hum Aur Hamara Swasthya” in its Madhyamik Shiksha curriculum, and is launching it in its basic education as well.

This book, written by a medical specialist and health expert and produced by a non-profit organisation called HOPE Initiative (Health Oriented Programs and Education), covers ten topics that that are considered universally important:

1. Sanitation and Hygiene that describes the seven steps of hand washing and covers toilet etiquette
2. Life style diseases such as excess consumption of fast food, lack of physical exercise, calculating one’s Body Mass Index, and tackling obesity in school children.
3. Managing examination stress
4. Bullying, ragging and violence in schools
5. Road Traffic accidents and their prevention
6. Global warming
7. Knowing about but resisting peer pressure initiation to alcohol, tobacco and drugs
8. Mosquito menace: simple steps to be taken at home and locality to ward off malaria and dengue
9. Hepatitis and its prevention. Ensuring vaccination from this preventable scourge
10. Celebrating festivals such as Diwali and Holi in a safe and healthy manner

The well-illustrated attractive book with pictures and cartoons aims to extend its reach beyond students to their siblings and parents, in what is described as a “school-to-community” approach. And to make the health topics interesting, HOPE has produced 6 documentary movies and 3 educational games as supplement.

The spade work for introducing health education in schools had begun few years ago with the Education Department of UP government engaging HOPE to provide training to teachers of 6000 schools of 25 districts of the state on health issues, with support from the philanthropic BMS Foundation.

Supporting school health programs to improve the health status of our nation’s young people has never been more important. Their health is critically related to the health-related behavior they choose to adopt.

Public health experts estimate that even a modest decline in the number of adolescents getting addicted to tobacco each year for instance, could lead to significant reduction in the incidence of heart and chest diseases, and save many lives from cardiac and cancer deaths in the community.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Teaching and Learning – is there a trick?

One of the big mistakes that we as parents and teachers often make, and that could stifle the mental development of our children, is to treat them as just small adults! In fact, it is this attitude of grown-ups that could be leading our next generation to become stereotyped conformists rather than original thinkers and innovators. And if we intend to drive home health messages and inculcate healthy habits we need to tailor our efforts to their cognitive potential. That children indeed think and discover the world differently was first noticed by a Swiss scientist Jean Piaget in the early 20th century. He studied his own three children grow and was intrigued by how they behaved, played games and learnt at different ages. With further observations and experiments, he propounded the theory of ‘cognitive development’, placed great importance on the education of children and is hailed even today, 30 years after his death, as a pioneer of the constructive theory of knowing.  He...

The Doctor’s Dress

The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has started generating  murmurs  of controversy. It is not uncommon to find the blood pressure to be higher when measured by a white-coat-wearing-doctor in the hospital or clinic than the readings obtained at home by relatives.  This is due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting evokes in patients, and has been termed “White Coat Hypertension”. Mature clinicians often routinely subtract a few points from these measurements when entering records in case charts or calculating the dose of anti-hypertensive medications to be prescribed. The white coat scares children too.  Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming and by denying access to their bellies or chest for examination by paediatricians in this attire. Many pediatricians across the world have folded up their white coats and taken to informal colourful dressing to...

Questions from a Doctor’s Life

There is hardly any person in Uttar Pradesh who has not heard of Dr D K Chhabra, a senior neurosurgeon, who died recently. Over the decades his expertise, pragmatic advice and popularity had broken the shackles of his narrow surgical field coming to be known as a “brain-specialist”and a genuine adviser for all health problems. I got to know him in 1987 when I joined the upcoming Sanjay Gandhi PG Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGI) in Lucknow as a young member of the faculty in Gastroenterology. He had moved from his alma mater the KG Medical College where he is still regarded as a legend. An omnipresent bachelor doctor living in the duty room readily available to help anybody anytime.He was tasked to heading and developing Neurosciences at SGPGI. He had an eye for detail and was tasked additionally by the director to set up not just his department, but the whole hospital, the building, equipment and the campus. DKC was a tall and handsome man who spoke little. But when he did inl...