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Correspondence

Indian Pediatr 2017;54: 974

Creating Health Consciousness Among Adolescent Students – An Innovative Initiative

 

*Shridhar Dwivedi and O P Yadava

National Heart Institute, East of Kailash, New Delhi, India.
Email: [email protected]

   


Awareness is the key to prevention of many non-communicable diseases such as coronary artery disease (CAD), diabetes and hypertension. The established methods for creating such awareness are : organizing public awareness campaigns, launching health camps on ‘Health Days’ such as World No Tobacco Day (31st May), World Health Day (7th April) World Heart Day (29th September), World Diabetes Day (14th November), World Hypertension Day (17th May) and World Cancer Day (4th February). We propose herewith an innovative method of creating health consciousness by imparting health-related lectures to adolescent school students of Grade VIII to X. These lectures pertain to key issues like healthy life style, personal hygiene, heart attack, diabetes, obesity and nutrition, menstrual hygiene, and basic life support. The reason behind this strategy is the belief that the seeds for most lifestyle disorders are laid in early childhood and adolescence. Students are very impressionable, malleable, adoptive and quick learners at this age, and sensitization at an early age shall help inculcate right habits. Further, these children shall be the ambassador of healthy life style to their family and society in future. It is also surmised that they would be able to recognize these diseases at very early stage and persuade the afflicted family members/other persons to seek medical attention urgently.

Guided by the above conviction, we organized multiple lectures in different schools of Delhi. Topics covered were: healthy life style, heart attack, diabetes, personal hygiene and menstrual hygiene. Each lecture was of 40 minutes duration followed by 20 minute interaction. These were PowerPoint-based presentations, and the major thrust was on illustrations. At the end of the lecture session, each school was provided with two copies of NHI School Health Book, specially prepared for such program [1]. We have since taken this program to Almora District in Uttarakhand where we have targeted, besides adolescent students, their parents during parent-teacher meetings.

One of the 15-year-old Grade X student, who had height of 170 cm, and weight of 80 kg (BMI 27.67), became conscious of being overweight after listening to our lecture, and adopted a healthy lifestyle and healthy food habits. Most recent example is that of a 14-year-old American student who recognized early signs of stroke in her mother and informed health authorities; and her mom could be saved from aftermath of paralytic stroke. She could do this because she had heard about stroke in a science lecture only 2 days before her mother had stroke. Such could be the effect of health lectures delivered to adolescent students [2].

References

1. Dwivedi S, Arora YK, Bose PP. NHI School Health Book. Published by National Heart Institute, 2017.

2. Nehma Z, Andrew E, Bernard S, Patsamanis H, Cameron P, Bray JE, et al. Impact of public awareness campaign on out-of-hospital cardiac arrest incidence and mortality rates. Eur Heart J. 2017;38:1666-73.


 

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