Vice-Chairperson and CEO of Qatar Foundation, H E Sheikha Hind bint Hamad Al Thani has said education systems need to create less anxious future for children and empower them with right tools to express themselves. Sheikha Hind was in discussion at a session on ‘The Role of Schools in Child and Adolescent Health’ during the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) 2020, which concluded yesterday. The Countess of Wessex; WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti; and Professor in Adolescent Health, University College London, Prof. Russell Viner joined the discussion which focused on whether health and education are being properly integrated. “Mental health is a critical subject that is missing in our education systems, but I don’t believe adding it to school assignments or looking at it as a metric to improve school performance will solve the issue,” Sheikha Hind told the discussion. “We need to take a step back and look at health as an integral component of living a fulfilled life.
“The first step becomes identifying how schools themselves are contributing to the mental health crisis — what is the effect on children of regular exams, of bullying, of competitive sport? We should take an honest look at how we, as institutions, can help to relieve that stress, because if we are going to tackle student wellbeing, we need to be serious about creating a less anxious future,” she said. Sheikha Hind also highlighted the importance of integrating health and education in teaching students about wellbeing. “What are the physiological requisites that make mental wellbeing even possible, because half of the solution lies in asking the right questions. Teaching children the right vocabulary to express themselves is something that I feel is often overlooked, so we should ask how we can give children the right language to express their feelings,” she said.
“The most important thing is to know how we empower children, and empowering a child comes from giving them the adequate tools that can cater to their unique needs and allow them to grow in a safe, healthy, and nurturing environment,” Sheikha Hind added. The Countess of Wessex, who is Patron of Vision 2020: The Right To Sight and Global Ambassador for the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness, said she has seen first-hand “the effect that early intervention can have on preventing young eyes losing sight”.
“In the past two decades, enormous progress has been made in ensuring children have the opportunity to learn about the importance of eyecare, and in detecting problems at an early stage so that they can be successfully treated and managed,” she said. WISH is dedicated to capturing and disseminating the best evidence-based ideas and practices in healthcare, with the goal of creating a healthier world through global collaboration. The WISH report on ‘Building Healthy Societies: A Framework For Integrating Health And Health Promotion Into Education’ was also highlighted during the discussion.
A co-chair of the report, Professor Russell Viner, said, “COVID-19 has taught us just how closely linked health and education really are. It is important for school environments to be resilient in many ways including preventing outbreaks.” “Schools must be engines of health as well as wealth – they already are, to some extent, but we need to tinker with how they operate to promote health in a more basic sense. We must look to build an education system with health threaded through it, so we produce young people who are healthier and have greater wellbeing,” he added.
