Development of School-based Self Care Packages for Adolescences

Abstract

Abstract Introduction: Adolescents have special health concerns and needs. Some health promoting behaviors are formed during adolescence and often remain utill adulthood. Health promoting self-care behaviors are the main ways to prevent from chronic diseases. Objective: The main objective of this study was development of school-based self-care packages for adolescences to promote their health behaviors. Methods and Materials: This study was health system research conducted in 2016 in four steps. At first, self-care instances in adolescents were extracted through systematic review. Then, the Adolescent Health Promotion (AHP) questionnaire was used to determine the self-care status of the students and the results were analyzed by SPSS software. Descriptive statistics and parametric tests were used to analyze the variables. Further, self-care packages were developed according to the results of this study, national and international approaches to health promotion and finally the appropriate training method for implementing developed self-care packages was designed. Results: The mean score of the health promoting behaviors was 69.83. The highest and lowest scores belonged to dimensions of spiritual health and physical health, respectively. The training package was developed in four dimensions of health and 12 subjects were selected for developing it. Lecture, role play, and practical demonstration were used to train self-care packages, and training through peers' education was identified an education methods. Conclusion: The results of this study showed that health promoting self-care behaviors among adolescents are at the good level. Most of adolescents didn’t have enough physical activity and had overweight, obesity and hypertension. Therefore, more self-care was needed and self-care packages were developed for adolescences. So, it is recommended that self-care training through peer education be prioritized in schools. Keywords: Health Promotion; Training Package; Self-Care; Education Method; Adolescent; Peers.