Reflecting the local practice of health promoting schools

Schools are a community resource and are recognized as natural Health promoters. With this as a principle, the Health Promoting School’s (HPS) concept was born from the idea that a school’s unique role can be optimized through a properly thought out health promotion effort.  Because the concept doesn’t happen by itself, each school has to be proactive.

For getting to know students, parents, teachers and health workers views about their paths through the implementation of the HPS’s concept, in a Portuguese school, a few objectives were set: to identify facilitators and difficulties felt by the participants in the HPS implementation and the role apportioned to each person in this process. We choose a qualitative approach by using focus groups and content analysis to explore the gathered data. Thinking about effective and sustained health promotion in a school, participants said a school’s health promotion project has to be developed by school members and partners, with the support of the school board. They also said it is easy to get students involved, to provide access to information and to get community partners. However, lack of cooperation and commitment, parental involvement, deficient communication, proper definition of each other’s roles, obstacles raised by school boards and lack of training on teachers’ abilities were identified as the main difficulties. On people who should be involved, the participants defined their role clearly and often said that “a nurse in school is needed”, something that is far from Portuguese schools reality.  Effective communication channels, a transdisciplinar approach and the involvement of all members of the school community are said to be crucial in making the project happen and work. This study also suggests that there is still a gap in Portugal concerning the experience sharing, something that turns the implementation of HPS even harder.