Dubai: In a bid to promote A healthy lifestyle among UAE schoolchildren, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) has announced the launch of Health Skills, a new training manual to help health educators at schools, following the conclusion of its pilot School Health Education project.
Unicef’s School Health Education project addresses the challenges of delivering health education to students, and promotes the use of active, participatory learning activities for developing the necessary knowledge and attitudes for students to make healthy choices.
“Knowledge is the stepping stone for students to develop healthier lifestyles. Analysis showed an average improvement in students’ knowledge on various health topics by 14 per cent. Segregating the data showed a knowledge increase of 15 per cent for girls and 12 per cent for boys,” Dr Ebrahim Al Ziq, Unicef Gulf Area Office Representative, said.
The project was launched in December 2013, in joint collaboration with the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, Seha ambulatory health services and du telecommunications.
The project comes as part of the national ‘Every Step Counts’ initiative, which aims to encourage healthy lifestyle adoption across the UAE. The School Health Educations project covered 18 secondary government schools across the UAE, with two in each of the emirates, Al Ain and the Western Region.
The results were measured through a pre- and post-assessment session conducted among 1,800 students prior to and at the end of the health education session.
The Health Skills manual is designed for health educators in the UAE working with students between the ages of 11 and 16. It includes a number of activities, methods, tools and resources to deliver health education using an interactive approach.
Al Ziq said that the manual, which went through different evaluations until it was finally developed, is divided into three main parts.
“The first explains the concept of health education based on skills. The second part provides a range of simplified interactive collaborative activities and tools. The third part includes a set of applied process models, which helps the manual user develop work sessions and take advantage of the ideas contained therein,” he said.
Dr Hussain Mohammad Al Rand, Assistant Undersecretary for Health Centres and Clinics at the Ministry of Health, said, “The Health Skills manual was drafted to raise awareness of basic practices and behaviours that promote a healthy lifestyle.”
