Teaching preventative health education is hard, if only because there are so many subjects to talk about. We quickly realized this fact when our HealthCorps term started with Salud Family Health Centers (Fort Lupton, Co) in September 2011; from day one the School Outreach team was drowning with ideas, questions, bureaucracy, and dead-end streets. So, we asked ourselves two simple questions: (1) Who would benefit most from our services? and (2) What topics should we focus on?.

We answered question 1 by finding a list of Title I (under-served/low-resource) schools in our catchment area, deciding to mainly market our services to the students in this population. Many students in these schools receive little, if any, health education. Question 2 proved harder to answer. The list seems never-ending: anti-smoking, healthy hand-washing, bicycle safety, bullying, puberty, sex ed, nutrition, dental hygeine, etc etc etc. Although we do teach any and all of these courses, we chose to focus on Nutrition and Sex Ed. This decision was informed by many of the patient problems in our Community Health Center: high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and teenage pregnancy. This is, in essence, the idea behind preventative health education: create good habits so that these issues can’t take root.

We bring nutrition classes to elementary schools. They include discussion about the food pyramid, sugar content (soda is HORRIBLE!), processed foods (Hot Cheetos are HORRIBLE!), and the need for a regular eating schedule. The presentation ends with a hands-on healthy snack, interspersed by students exclaiming how much they now love carrots and bananas. Sex Ed is fun, but in a different way -- high schoolers invent thoughtful, applicable, and sometimes ridiculous questions. And although we always promote dialogue, parts of the class are punctuated by a deep silence, teenagers marveling at percentages and pictures. There is a lot to talk about here too, but we focus mainly on contraception, STIs, and the ‘cost of a baby’. We occasionally bring in guest medical students to talk about their clinic experiences, speaking from a knowledge base which we simply don’t possess. These presentations have led us to identify other problems, and find solutions (we are in the process of developing a mentoring program at one of our more frequently visited high schools).

It is hard to measure community impact-- this is a problem with preventative health. For Sex Ed, we know that students are coming into the clinics for free contraception and STI testing. We have numbers, too -- a total of 186 students served in nutrition classes, and 581 in Sex Ed. Although the results are surely long-term, student reactions to our presentation say it all -- respectful, attentive, and genuinely concerned about their own health.