PROMOTING HEALTH

Promoting Health: Disease Prevention

I could engage in a number of actions to help prevent disease in my classroom. To ensure that the courses of action I take on this front are effective and, thus, successful, there is need to consult available literature on the same. I could also seek to engage various stakeholders, i.e. school management, parents and peers in efforts to further ensure the success of the proposed interventions. Below are six steps that I could deploy to not only ensure that the class is health conscious, but to also ensure that spread of communicable diseases is prevented. Given that the country, and indeed the entire world, has been grappling with one of the worst respiratory pandemics in recent times, the six-step plan has been created with the COVID-19 pandemic in mind.

Step 1: Ensure that every person who gains access to the classroom has a face mask on. This is especially useful given that as has been pointed out in the Healthy Children resource, spread of the virus has been observed more often in schools that did not require universal masking.

Step 2: Have a hand sanitizer available for all persons who gain access to the classroom.

Step 3: Require students to sit one meter apart. This is also crucial given that the classroom happens to be a confined space.

Step 4: Require students to observe basic hygienic standards while in class such as sneezing/coughing into their elbow or not picking their noses whenever they have their mask off (i.e. when blowing their noses or in efforts to promote audibility when making a presentation).

Step 5: Require students to wipe their workspaces with a sanitizer (alcohol at 70-90% provided) after each session.

Step 6: Require students to report any COVID-related symptoms to the instructor