Teenagers must think about healthy living

The aim of the current study was to investigate the impact of promoting health through talks and workshops, to students at schools and colleges. We believe that this would impact on designing a dynamic curriculum for training health/medical students in a higher education setting. Schools and colleges in the region were contacted with the prospect of offering free health promotion service by qualified academics from a higher education establishment. Questionnaires were distributed prior to the start of the talks and were collected at the end. The talks focussed on smoking, drug and alcohol abuse, healthy eating and STD's. The results showed that the interest, originality and impact factor were high for all talks. The comments obtained from students reflected the need for an external organisation to deliver such talks. The method of delivery and the content of the talks also contributed to the high interest factor. It is therefore essential that a health/medical curriculum should reflect the need for health professionals to work interprofessionally in order to help deliver effective health promotion programmes to schools and to the wider community.