Give Us New School Health Policy Now -Stakeholders

Stakeholders in the education and health sectors have urged the Federal Government to put in place a new national school health policy.

It has become necessary for the government to review the existing 2006 National School Health Policy to help improve the health conditions of school children, they said.

They made the call at a “Roundtable Iterations on Revising the 2006 NSHP,” which held in Enugu yesterday.

Providing a background to the event, the Principal Investigator PUSH project, Dr Prince Agwu, said a revision of the existing new school health policy had become exigent to accommodate emerging health issues of children across schools in Nigeria.

He said a policy review for the project, discovered as inadequate, sundry policies on health and well-being of children.

He mentioned such as the Child Rights Act, National Policy on the Health and Development of the young people were not effective, even as the school-based health services were not optimal.

According to Agwu, there were also alarming neglect of essential health indicators and complete breakdown of links between schools and health system, particularly primary healthcare.

“The consequences of these failings reflect a lack of collective and committed attention to the health of school children evidenced by an outdated school health policy.

“It was in that process, it became clear that we need to work on the national school health policy to meet the current realities.

“We held policy dialogue by engaging children. So we made sure that the voices of children are well integrated into the evidence we have produced.

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“We are hoping that the Federal Ministry of Education, as a team will continue working with us to see how we can push this policy to the next phase of validation and implementation based on evidence we produced,” Agwu said.

According to him, they used qualitative and quantitative researches, as well as geographic information system to study the various health challenges facing scholars.

Stakeholders represented at the roundtable were from the:

1. Federal Ministries of Education, Health and Social Welfare,
2. Women Affairs and Budget and Economic Planning,
3. World Health Organisation (WHO)
4. Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC)
5. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO),
6. National Primary Healthcare Development Agency (NPHDA),
7. Enugu State Primary Healthcare Development Agency,
8. Paediatrics Association of Nigeria (PAN).

The meeting, supported by the River State Ministry of Health, University of Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom and CHORUS Urban Health Research Consortium, held under the auspices of the Protect Urban School Children’s Health (PUSH) project led by University of Nigeria’s Health Policy Research Group (HPRG).