Contextualising Informed Health Choices primary school resources for use in different countries

Article type
Authors
Rosenbaum S1, Group IHC2
1Centre for Informed Health Choices, Norwegian Institute of Public Health
2Norwegian Institute of Public Health
Abstract
Background:
People of all ages are flooded with health claims. Many claims are not reliable and people often lack the skills to assess their reliability. Primary school is the ideal time to begin to teach these skills, laying a foundation for critical thinking about health choices. However, these skills are rarely taught in primary school. To teach these skills in primary schools, we developed the Informed Health Choices (IHC) primary school resources (Figure 1. See also www.informedhealthchoices.org), informed by user feedback and school pilots in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Norway. IHC resources were shown to be effective in a large trial in Uganda. However, it is uncertain if they can work in other settings. Before introducing or evaluating the impact of resources in new settings, we need to explore what adaptations are necessary.

Objecctives:
To explore and carry out adaptations of IHC primary school learning resources for contextualization to other contexts than they were originally created for.

Methods:
Multiple teams, including from Kenya, Rwanda, Norway, Spain, Ireland, USA, South Africa, France, Switzerland, Italy and China, are involved in various contextualization activities. These include market and stakeholder analyses (document analyses and interviews with teachers, administrators, policymakers, parents, publishers); translation (involving feedback from networks of students and teachers); and school pilots (classroom observation, user-test interviews with children and teachers, feedback from parents and teachers' networks). We have developed guides with protocols for each of these activities.

Results:
This work will result in IHC primary school resource contextualisation for multiple languages and country contexts that are informed by a broad range of user and stakeholder feedback, as well as packages of materials for new collaborators.

Conclusions:
People from other languages/settings (both researchers and non-researchers) are welcome to join us in this work.

Patient and public involvement:
The IHC primary school resources have been designed for children, who are patients and citizens, and children, teachers, and parents have been engaged in designing and evaluating them. Primary school children, their teachers, parents and administrators are providing feedback and shaping the adaptation of the IHC learning resources for their settings.