Intersectoral working in schools between education staff and primary healthcare professionals

Nous serions heureux d’accueillir les propositions soumises en français. Pour plus d’informations, consultez la Fiche d’information pour les participants et La fiche d’étude de cas à remplir.

You are invited to participate in our project to collect case studies of intersectoral working initiatives between health and education professionals to promote the health of all students in schools. Below we describe why the collection of case studies is being done, and why we invite you to participate.

Why is this study being done?

The pandemic has highlighted the importance of the relationship between health and education, and the need to increase schools’ resilience for any future health crises. Each student has to be equipped with a range of everyday skills to make independent and responsible decisions about their own health, which includes effective use of primary healthcare systems, and to live as a ‘good health citizen’ when the situation demands social public health strategies.

During the pandemic, our Chair published a commentary about schools as the foundation for healthy lives (Jourdan et al., 2021) where the potential for effective partnerships between health and education professionals was highlighted. Primary healthcare professionals could have key roles including advocacy in communities for school health, and capacity-building among teachers for delivering health-related curriculum material. This would help to reverse the widening health equity gaps the pandemic has precipitated in our schools and communities, including our youth’s future wellbeing.

The UNESCO Chair ‘Global Health & Education’ (UNESCO Chair GHE) launches this call for good practices with the objective of strengthening our collective understanding of effective intersectoral working between health and education professionals in – and for – schools.

What do we plan to do?

The UNESCO Chair GHE will collect case studies of intersectoral working initiatives between health and education professionals to promote the health of all students in schools. We will describe and analyse how the initiatives were set up, identify the barriers and facilitators to the development of such initiatives, and reflect on their conditions for success. We would be interested in knowing also about intersectoral initiatives that did not work well, and why you think this might be so. The UNESCO Chair GHE is collecting experiences of individuals and communities from a wide variety of social and cultural global contexts. The call is focused on schools for students aged 0-18. The collected case studies will be clearly described ensuring that we can learn from them – both in terms of success, effectiveness, potential and challenges.

Who is invited to contribute?

Everyone who is involved in, or has experience of, intersectoral working initiatives between primary healthcare and education professionals to promote the health of all students in schools. The call is focused on schools for students aged 0-18.

How do we define intersectoral working?

Here are some examples of what we mean by ‘intersectoral working’:

  • Education and health professionals acting in synergy towards a common goal to improve the health of students in schools

OR

  • The initiative contributes to creating links and coherence between professionals, thereby improving interventions and promoting more systemic change

OR

  • Education and health professionals are involved in co-creation processes in schools, which may also involve students and parents, to ensure that health resources are tailor-made for that cultural and social context.

What will happen if you take part?

Please send your completed template to the Project Lead, Dr Nicola Gray, using the email N.J.Gray@hud.ac.uk by 31 May 2023. Please send it preferably in English or French, but you can send it in another language if you prefer, and we will use an electronic translation tool for it.

The case studies will form a repository of good practices on the Chair’s website. In addition, we plan to disseminate our findings about effective intersectoral working and school resilience through a summary available on the Chair’s websites (in French and English) and an article in a good quality peer-reviewed journal. You will receive a summary of the collection of case studies in English and French by 30 September 2023.

What are the possible benefits if you contribute?

By completing the template with your experiences, you will contribute by sharing your knowledge and experiences of effective intersectoral working between health and education professionals in schools. Through the repository on our website, your work will be shared with a global audience. You will also be able to identify new contacts by being part of the UNESCO Chair GHE global community.

What happens if you change your mind?

If you change your mind and prefer not to include your case study, we can remove it from the website and your information can be securely destroyed. If we have started publishing papers using aggregated data, however, we cannot remove your anonymized case from the analysis.

Who is doing and supporting this study?

Nicola Gray, N.J.Gray@hud.ac.uk – Co-Chairholder for the UNESCO Chair GHE at the University of Huddersfield, UK – is leading the project, Shraddha Manandhar Shraddha.Manandhar@hud.ac.uk  is leading the qualitative data analysis, and Catherine Chabot catherine.chabot@unescochair-ghe.org  is in charge of the collection of the case studies.

The study is being funded by the Commonwealth Fund of New York City, USA, through their Senior Harkness Fellows Small Grants Program https://www.commonwealthfund.org/. It has received ethical approval from the School of Applied Sciences Research Integrity and Ethics Committee of the University of Huddersfield (SAS-SRIEC-20.04.23-1).