Health Education and Information Literacy
China has 900 million rural residents with healthcare needs. In general, prevention, early detection and treatment are widely known to be the most cost-effective ways to improve people’s health condition. Evergreen Education Foundation considers health education to align well with its overall mission of delivering knowledge to the most-needed places. By means of a collaborative investigation with TongWei High School in GanSu province, Evergreen initiated health education in 2009. The goal is to deliver health knowledge and literacy skills to the school students and local community through the Evergreen library system.
Pilot Project: Tongwei Health Education ( July 2009 - July 2012)
A 3-year project, starting from July 2009, promoted healthcare awareness and delivered basic healthcare knowledge to the school students and the local community in Tongwei County, Gansu through Tongwei public and school library system supported by Evergreen. Also based on the local needs, Evergreen worked with local authorities to build a local school clinic and sponsor annual physical examinations for students conducted by the school clinic and the County Epidemic Prevention Station.
To address the lack of health knowledge and literacy skills identified through surveys, the public library system led by Tongwei County Public Library and the school library system led by Tongwei No. 1 High School Library developed a health education network and a resource sharing partnership. They designed paths for different community groups to acquire health care information and improve health literacy. The high school developed school-based health education curriculum to improve students’ knowledge and literacy and implemented health checkups for the students. The teacher/ psychological counselor of the school also experimented with psychological health education, using both a teacher-facilitated book and a movie discussion for prevention and onsite psychological counseling for triage and treatment. The county public library provided health seminars, trained the township residents to search online health information, printed a bimonthly digest featured with rotating topics for various demographic groups (e.g. an issue devoted to occupational disease of migrant workers at Chinese New Year, when most return home). Both High School and County expanded their service through their satellites by visiting villages and schools to enhance people’s awareness and knowledge and promoting much needed health practices, e.g. oral hygiene. An assessment survey of over 300 rural residents showed that the residents’ awareness of oral disease and prevention had increased from 32.1 percent to 72.3 percent. The migrant workers' awareness of occupational diseases and prevention increased from 21.3 percent to 62.1 percent. The satisfaction rate for all the health education programs reached 81 percent.
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Evergreen Education Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit charity registered in California, United States. Registration number 68-0474814.