How can you help?
The World Health Organization in collaboration with partners is planning to develop an implementation guidance for School Health Services (SHS). To develop a guidance that speaks to contexts in different regions and countries, WHO is seeking users’ perspective on key needs, challenges and facilitating factors in implementing SHS in their respective countries. We need your expertise to capture key implementation aspects that the guidance needs to cover.
Background
School Health Services (SHS) are defined by the WHO as services provided by a health worker to students enrolled in primary or secondary education, either within school premises or in a health service situated outside the school premises that has an official agreement with the school to provide health services to the school’s students.
Schools offer an unmatched opportunity to implement intensive, long-term and large-scale health programmes to children and adolescents. Globally, most children and adolescents are enrolled in school, therefore SHS are well placed to timely respond to students’ health needs, leveraging the intrinsic link between health and education.
In 2021, WHO, UNESCO, and other partners have published a package of guidance to support school health programmes, including global standards for health promoting schools (HPS) and the WHO guideline on school health services:
- Global standards for health-promoting schools
- Implementation guidance for health-promoting schools
- Country case studies on health-promoting schools
- WHO guideline on school health services
The WHO guideline on school health services provides a menu of evidence-based interventions for school health services, however implementation aspects are not covered. Many countries have SHS but they are often not evidence-based, are not implemented well, are underfunded and/or are delivered with limited reach and scope. SHS are often omitted in national whole-school approaches.
Target audience for the survey
The survey is aimed at professionals involved in SHS, including school nurses, doctors, psychologists, counselors, dental care workers, and policymakers within the health and education sectors in charge of school health programmes and/or school health services.
The deadline for submission of your feedback is 27 March /2024.
Contact
If you have technical difficulties with the online form, please send an email to divalat@who.int with the subject “Informing the development of the Implementation Guidance for School Health Services"
Thank you very much for your consideration and we look forward to your contribution.