School nurses given teenage tuition advice in Unicef project

School nurses and students across the UAE participated in workshops this week as part of a programme to improve school health education.

ABU DHABI // Young teenagers are a notoriously difficult age group to work with, so school nurses are to get advice on how to better teach them about their health.

Focus-group discussions with school nurses and students were held throughout the UAE this week as part of a pilot programme to improve health education in the country.

“The students and the nurses gave so many ideas about how they want to deliver health messages,” said Dr Najah Mustafa, director of school health services for Abu Dhabi Emirate at the Ministry of Health.

“We are very, very excited about this project.”

Unicef experts designed the School Health Education Project, which is to be implemented by the Abu Dhabi Health Services Company, or Seha, and the health and education ministries. Du telecoms company is also a partner.

The organisers chose to focus on 12 to 15-year-olds not only because they are more difficult for school nurses to work with, but because health surveys have shown that 40 per cent of them are overweight or obese.

“With this age group, school nurses are finding it a bit more challenging to get the message to them,” said Dr Dalia Haroun, a public health and nutrition specialist with Unicef who is managing the programme.

“It’s a difficult age to get messages across, especially when it comes to health.”

School nurses from 18 government schools took part, Dr Haroun said. Two workshops were held for the nurses, one in Dubai and one in Abu Dhabi, and four were held for students in different emirates.

The next step in the year-long programme is to put together a three-day training course for the nurses, scheduled for next month, and the manual.

Students were an essential part of the process, Dr Haroun said, to hear about “how they’re finding health education and what they would like to be enhanced”.

“At the end of the day, the aim is to get them involved and participating,” she said.

So far the nurses have hoped that the project training manual can advise them on examples of approaches to use in classrooms and activities to help better engage young people, Dr Haroun said.

“At the moment there is no unified approach on how nurses should be delivering their message,” she said.

Training and programming already exists for school nurses, but health officials hope to streamline it. “We want it to be like a framework, something structured. And that’s why this project is so important,” Dr Mustafa said.

The project, announced in December, is among a series of moves to curb obesity and diabetes rates in the UAE, particularly among children.

A study released in June suggested one in three UAE children aged six to 19 is overweight or obese, putting them at risk of diseases such as diabetes and hypertension.

Recent laws have also sought to prevent young people from smoking, banning those under 18 from buying cigarettes and keeping shisha cafes away from schools and residential areas.

Unicef has similar pilot programmes in different phases in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. In its 2012 report on the UAE, the UN organisation said an aim for children in the country was to “ensure that social and cultural practices and beliefs among adolescents, their parents and school staff are supportive to adopting healthier lifestyles”.

Dr Haroun said if the programme was successful, the team hoped to expand it to other age groups. But for now, younger teens were the priority.

“For this pilot study, we wanted to target the group that was in the most need,” she said.

Changing behaviours takes time, and it’s more than just imparting the facts, Dr Mustafa said.

“Healthy behaviour is not something easy. It doesn’t only come from knowledge,” she said.

"You might have the knowledge that Coca-Cola is bad for you, but still you might want to drink it."