Citation

Ross DA, Plummer ML, Montgomery P, Kohl K, Siegfried N, Saewyc E, Baltag V. J. Adolesc. Health 2021; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.jadohealth.2021.04.036

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Schools have unmatched potential to provide health services to older children and adolescents. Nowadays, in virtually every country of the world, the great majority of school-age children and adolescents (5-19 years) attend school on approximately half of the days of the year. Global net primary and secondary school enrolment rates. The net school enrolment rate is the number of students of official school age who are enrolled in education as a percentage of the total children of the official school-age population have increased substantially over recent decades; by 2020, they were estimated to have reached 89% and 66%, respectively. In countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, children and adolescents are estimated to spend an average of 7,590 hours in the classroom over the 8-10 years that they are in primary and lower secondary school. School health services may be the only institutional way to meet the health-care needs of most school-age children and adolescents on a regular basis and at scale. School health services also have the potential to increase health equity through improved access to services because they are usually free at the point of use and are provided within, or very close to, the school. This can be especially important for underserved children and adolescents who do not have adequate coverage with effective health services for their needs. Furthermore, when implemented with reasonable quality, school health services are highly valued by students, parents, and communities.


Despite all these potential advantages and the fact that most countries have established school health service programs, these programs generally have not received the attention they deserve from researchers, policy-makers, and development partners. In high-income countries, school health services often rely on a network of school nurses, sometimes including school-based health centers. However, in many low- or middle-income countries, school health service programs are more severely underfunded and/or delivered with limited reach and scope. In practice, in numerous low- or middle-income countries, school health services are limited to those that can be delivered by teachers, such as counseling or periodic deworming, and/or to rare visits by clinical staff from a local health facility, for example, to administer human papillomavirus vaccinations. This situation represents a critical missed opportunity. It means that adolescents in these contexts will often only contact health services if they are ill or injured, and with delay, when they are severely ill. Furthermore, adolescence is a key period for the onset of many health concerns, such as mental health or visual acuity disorders. It is also when different kinds of risk behaviors that have major impacts on future adult mortality and morbidity are either initiated or consolidated, such as the use of alcohol, tobacco and other substances, risky sexual behaviors, and the adoption of healthy or unhealthy dietary and exercise habits...

Language: en