What is Health Education: Health education is one strategy for implementing health promotion and disease prevention programs. Health education provides learning experiences on health topics. Health education strategies are tailored for their target population. Health education presents information to target populations on particular health topics, including the health benefits/threats they face, and provides tools to build capacity and support behavior change in an appropriate setting.

Characteristics of health education strategies include:

• Participation of the target population.
• Completion of a community needs assessment to identify community capacity, resources, priorities, and needs.
• Planned learning activities that increase participants’ knowledge and skills.
• Implementation of programs with integrated, well-planned curricula and materials that take place in a setting convenient for participants.
• Presentation of information with audiovisual and computer based supports such as slides and projectors, videos, books, CDs, posters, pictures, websites, or software programs.
• Ensuring proficiency of program staff, through training, to maintain fidelity to the program model.

WHY IS HEALTH EDUCATION IMPORTANT?

• Health education improves the health status of individuals, families, communities, states, and
• the nation.
• Health education enhances the quality of life for all people.
• Health education reduces premature deaths.
• By focusing on prevention, health education reduces the costs (both financial and human)
• Those individuals, employers, families, insurance companies, medical facilities, communities,
• The state and the nation would spend on medical treatment.

Teaching School Health Education

In the United States some forty states require the teaching of health education. A comprehensive health education curriculum consists of planned learning experiences that will help students achieve desirable attitudes and practices related to critical health issues. Some of these are: emotional health and a positive self-image; appreciation, respect for, and care of the human body and its vital organs; physical fitness; health issues of alcohol, tobacco, drug use, and substance use disorders; health misconceptions and myths; effects of exercise on the body systems and on general well being; nutrition and weight control; sexual relationships and sexuality, the scientific, social, and economic aspects of community and ecological health; communicable and degenerative diseases including sexually transmitted diseases; disaster preparedness; safety and driver education; factors in the environment and how those factors affect an individual’s or population’s environmental health (ex: air quality, water quality, food sanitation); life skills; choosing professional medical and health services; and choices of health careers.

School National Health Education Standards

The National Health Education Standards (NHES) are written expectations for what students should know and be able to do by grades 2, 5, 8, and 12 to promote personal, family, and community health. The standards provide a framework for curriculum development and selection, instruction, and student assessment in health education. The performance indicators articulate specifically what students should know or be able to do in support of each standard by the conclusion of each of the following grade spans: Pre-K–Grade 12.

Health-promoting schools focus on:

• Caring for oneself and others.
• Making healthy decisions and taking control over life’s circumstances.
• Creating conditions that are conducive to health (through policies, services, physical/social conditions).
• Building capacities for peace, shelter, education, food, income, a stable ecosystem, equity, social justice, sustainable development.
• Preventing leading causes of death, disease and disability: helminths, tobacco use, HIV/AIDS/STDs, sedentary lifestyle, drugs and alcohol, violence and injuries, unhealthy nutrition.
• Influencing health-related behaviours: knowledge, beliefs, skills, attitudes, values, support.

WHAT DOES A TRAINED HEALTH EDUCATOR DO?

• Manage health education programs & personnel
• Assess individual and community needs
• Develop health education programs
• Handle controversial health issues/content
• Plan health education programs
• Coordinate health education programs
• Implement health education programs
• Build coalitions
• Identify resources
• Evaluate health education programs
• Write grants
• Make referrals
• Use a variety of education/training methods
• Develop social marketing and mass media campaigns
• Advocate for health related issues
• Encourage healthy behavior
• Organize/ mobilize communities for action
• Develop audio, visual, print and electronic materials
• Conduct research
• Write scholarly articles