School health services
Implications for action
School health services, many adolescents’ first point of contact with health systems, need to be better exploited. Their links with community services should be strengthened and they should take an integrated approach to health promotion. A WHO/Europe survey showed that action is needed:
- to improve access to and the quality of school health services;
- to ensure equal access to services for all groups of young people;
- to better align the services’ content with health priorities;
- to improve workforce knowledge and skills through specialized training programmes; and
- to involve families, care providers and teachers more actively in school-based health promotion programmes.
Health-system issues need to be addressed to improve school health services. These issues include inadequate funding, shortage of personnel, insufficiently defined position of school health services in educational institutions and unclear division between the responsibilities of school nurses and school doctors and family doctors. To tackle existing challenges, there is a strong need to use data on effectiveness to advocate the importance of school health services to the authorities.
WHO/Europe support to countries
WHO/Europe helps countries to strengthen school health services’ contribution to adolescent health and development through a national step-by-step process:
- making a situation analysis of school health services’ organization and provision;
- introducing professionals in countries to international experience, research evidence and best practices;
- developing a roadmap to strengthen the services’ response to adolescent health, within the context of a broader multisectoral strategy;
- developing, approving and disseminating national quality standards for providing services to adolescents, and developing a plan for their implementation;
- developing a set of competencies for school health personnel, and competency-based training programmes;
- developing and adapting generic materials to promote and guide the implementation and monitoring of activities to implement and monitor reform of school health services.
The approach has been applied in Albania, the Republic of Moldova, Tajikistan and Ukraine, where it promoted and informed the reorganization of school health services.
WHO/Europe gathers evidence on the organization of school health services in the European Region. Data are available from 37 countries on their governance, staffing, content and main challenges.
To facilitate experience sharing and direct contact between countries, WHO/Europe made a directory of focal points for school health services in the Region.
Background
Schools are currently the best (and perhaps the only) institution to reach most adolescents almost every day. School health services are therefore well placed to contribute to adolescent health and development, but their potential is underexplored. The experience of Schools for Health in Europe (SHE), a European initiative including 43 countries in the European Region, shows that school health services are an excellent asset for health promotion, but school health personnel require a new skill set.
