Educating Adolescents about their Health

Project name:  TUR/03/01/07-01/P07  Supporting Health Promotion for Adolescents

Budget: USD 250,000

Timeline:  July 2001 – December 2005

What's the situation?

In Turkey, although Health Education does take place in the current primary and high school curricula, pupils understanding of health issues generally remains inadequate. Most of these courses do not focus directly on changing attitudes and behaviours. In addition, since the teachers who are in charge of offering these courses may themselves not have up-to-date information, they may feel ill equipped to provide health information and instead end up imparting only superficial information on the topics concerned.

What's our mission?

 

Our mission is to support the efforts of the Ministry of National Education (MoNE) to integrate the health promotion program into both formal and non-formal education curricula. There are two main aspects of the program:

• Starting a health promotion course as part of the curriculum
• Training a number of teachers who will offer this course in the schools.

How is UNFPA doing this?

• By assessing the health information needs of young people
• By preparing suggestions to integrate health promotion topics in curricula of formal and non-formal education.
• By training school teachers on health education
• By integrating RH training into teachers' in-service training programmes
• By training teachers from Educational faculties
• By integrating health education into the education faculties' curriculum

 Who are our partners?

The Ministry of National Education, Health Affairs Department

Human Resource Development Foundation 

 

How will Turkey benefit?

In the short term, a number of teachers will be trained about RH so as to be able to support their students. In the long term; the development of the curricula  will increase the health knowledge of subsequent generations. In addition, educational faculties, RH training sessions and RH in-service training will create an infrastructure for skilled teachers to be able to answer the health needs of adolescents.

Contact Details:

Gökhan Yildirimkaya: gokhan.yildirimkaya@un.org.tr

Elif Elci: elif.elci@un.org.tr

Gaye Akay: akay_gaye@hotmail.com

Zumray Kutlu: ikgv@ikgv.org