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Indian Pediatr 2017;54: 974 |
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Creating Health Consciousness Among Adolescent Students – An
Innovative Initiative
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* Shridhar Dwivedi and O P Yadava
National Heart Institute, East of Kailash, New Delhi,
India.
Email:
[email protected]
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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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