 |
|
|
|
|
Students address health issues
By Sam Scott
The teen-age years often are filled with hard choices. But students at Sunnyvale's Columbia Middle School now have a tool for making important life decisions.
Sunnyvale's Neighborhood Center in late March implemented the "Teen Choices and Challenges" program, allowing eighth graders, with parental permission, to use a CD-ROM-based questionnaire to evaluate their habits, behavior and environment. Questions run the gamut of health matters, with topics including tobacco, nutrition, sexual activity and personal safety. The interactive program formats questions based on the user's responses, exploring matters pertinent to that person's experience.
After completing the computer-based profile, students meet with Columbia health educator Belita Anatalio to review a printout of the results, identifying what the student's health needs are.
"We look at what they doing that is safe and what they're doing that is not safe," Anatalio, a retired pediatrician, says. The program also prints out recommended tools for addressing specific areas, including teen-friendly help lines, community resources, and suggestions for overall health improvements.. Even if teens tune out Anatalio's advice, she says, they leaves with a printed copy of resources in hand.
A great advantage to the format, Anatalio says, is the honesty it inspires. When kids sit alone with the computer, they open up. "They definitely feel much more comfortable and answer more honestly to a computer than to a person or on paper," she says. The center assures that answers are kept confidential.
Rocio Abunidis-Rodriguez, the center's director, said the program strives to address problems before they've caused real damage. The program helps the center monitor problems that affect both individuals and the school at large and plan activities and speakers accordingly, she says.
"It really allows us to be proactive about identifying issues that kids are dealing with," says Abunidis-Rodriguez. "Right now we react to what is already happening to the kids. This allow us to be proactive on issues without them rising to the top."
Kaiser Permanente freely disperses the Teen Choices program to schools throughout the state. Project coordinator Pat Forman says the program focuses on teens' most common enemy--themselves.
"The risks to their health are primarily behavioral risks," she says. "That means they're preventable."
Teens, however, are unlikely to go to the hospital to take advantage of preventive medicine, she says. Offering this service at schools and community centers, Forman says, presents a format that teens are more likely to access.
|
|
|
|
Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
