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Hindi Research Article
Interdisciplinary Approach from Undergraduate Pre-Health Students in Children's Health Educational Initiative-A Pilot Community Intervention
Jianghong Liu*
University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, Philadelphia, PA, USA Sophie R Zhao
- Corresponding Author:
- Jianghong Liu, PhD, RN, FAAN
University of Pennsylvania Schools of Nursing and Medicine
418 Curie Blvd., Room 426, Claire M. Fagin Hall, Philadelphia
Pennsylvania 19104-6096, USA
Tel: (215) 898-8293
E-mail: jhliu@nursing.upenn.edu
Received Date: November 16, 2013; Accepted Date: December 23, 2013; Published Date: December 26, 2013
Citation: Zhao SR, Cao S, Lin PS, Yenor J, Lam R, et al. (2013) Interprofessional and Interdisciplinary Approach from Undergraduate Health and Pre-Medical Students in Children’s Health Educational Initiative. J Community Med Health Educ 4: 266. doi: 10.4172/2161-0711.1000266
Copyright: © 2013 Zhao SR, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The importance of interprofessional training in healthcare to improve quality of care and health outcomes has been increasingly recognized. This pilot study used an interprofessional and interdisciplinary team of undergraduate prehealth students to set up a unique community partnership with a local elementary school in developing and implementing a nutrition/exercise educational intervention. Our results suggest that children as young as 8 years old are capable of learning new information related to the benefits of particular food groups and are capable of retaining this knowledge for 6 months and that an intervention program as short as one hour every few months stand to make significant impact on children’s knowledge about proper nutrition and healthy lifestyles. Our results suggest the potential benefits of further expanding the short-term intervention into a longer-term community-based curriculum targeting a younger age group than commonly practiced in previous interventions. Furthermore, this pilot study suggests that undergraduate pre-health students can form an interprofessional and collaborative team to take an active role in the dissemination of nutrition knowledge in the community.
