School health services

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

School Health Services are services from medical, teaching and other professionals applied in or out of school to improve the health and well-being of children and in some cases whole families. These services have been developed in different ways around the globe but the fundamentals are constant ... the early detection, correction, prevention or amelioration of disease, disability and abuse from which school aged children can suffer.

Unesco Initiative

Unesco has published a set of tools, as part of its FRESH initiative, to guide those wishing to set up school health services around the world. Designed primarily for developing nations, these tools can be of universal use [1].The main emphasis of these tool is on:

• HIV/AIDS
• Food and nutrition
• Helminths and hygiene
• Malaria
• Violence
• Drugs, tobacco and alcohol

United States

School health services are well developed in the United Sates. Central guidelines are provided by Making Health Academic but each state and within that each school board has adopted its own specific methods.

Making Health Academic[2]

This is a five year project funded by CDC's Division of Adolescent and School Health (DASH) designed to enable all schools to be part of a co-ordinated school health program. The project is built around the fact that six preventable behaviours, mainly learned in childhood and youth, account for most of the serious illnesses and premature deaths in the United States; these are:[3]

• Tobacco use
• Abuse of alcohol and other drugs
• Poor eating habits
• Physical inactivity [4]
• Behaviours that result in injury
• Sexual behaviours that result in STD's or unintended pregnancy

There are eight components to the project:[5]

• Family and community involvement in school health to maximise resources and expertise.
• Comprehensive school health education to motivate and enable students.
• Physical education designed to promote lifelong physical activity
• School health services designed to identify and prevent health problems and ensure appropriate care for students.
• School nutrition services designed to promote health eating habits.
• Counseling, psychological services designed to facilitate positive learning and healthy behaviour.
• Healthy school environment designed to promote safe physical plant and a healthy and supportive environment that fosters leaning.
• Health promotion for school personnel designed to maintain and improve the health and well-being of staff, who serve as role models for students.

Examples of existing services

• Massachusetts. An example from a maritime state is [6] where a typical mission statement starts "School Health Services fosters the growth, development and educational achievement of Massachusetts' students by promoting their health and wellbeing ... "
• New Mexico. An example from a southern state is [7] where an interesting "yuccca model of coordinated school health" is used to help visualize the inter-relationship of the services.

United Kingdom

The health of children and youth in the UK is mainly the responsibility of the NHS, for example child health screening [8] and advice for parents of overweight children [9]. School based services are therefore more limited than in the US.

Examples of existing services

• England - Warrington [10]
• Northern Ireland [11]
• Scotland [12]

Other countries

Examples of existing services

• Australia [13]
• Canada [14]
• Ireland [15]
• Nigeria has a non-prifit NGO dedicated to improving the health of Nigerian adolescents.[16]
• Singapore [17]