The relevance of a Health Promotion Educative Project : smoking prevention in the Palmeira School group

Abstract

The Palmeira School Group (PSG) has built its Educative Project (EP) having as reference the new educative paradigm that valorises the future (human, scientific and technical future) in order to face appropriately the new challenges in a globalisation context. The PSG Educative Project (PSG-EP) aims at “developing health promoting habits in the school community”, where smoking addiction is a major bad habit target. The PSG-EP goals are the following: (i) to supply potentials for the development of competencies in the domains of “knowing how to be” and “knowing how to do”; (ii) to develop habits of critical, reflexive and aware citizenship; (iii) to promote the interlinking of knowledge and curricular contents with the needs of globalization; (iv) to promote collaboration, teamwork, the multidisciplinarity/transdisciplinarity of both health promotion know-how and authority for the progress of healthier lifestyles, particularly in giving up smoking. In this work the PSG-EP participants’ conceptions and perceptions were taken into account. They were teachers, educational action staff, pupils, parents and the local administrative authorities of a specific outskirts area of Braga town, making a total of 1423 participants. The results showed that 25% of the PSG population were smokers. There were fewer women smokers than men in all the sample groups, except for the teachers where both men and women smoking groups were similar, 35% each. From the total sample, the street group effect was the major factor (30%) contributing to smoking addiction, followed by lack of prevention (25%), low general literacy (19%), unemployment (9%), poverty (9%) and Legislation (8%). Less than 20% of the respondents were aware of smoking preventive campaigns in the PSG: 18% of the teachers, 15% the other school staff, 12% of the pupils and only 6% of the parents. Results show that 43% of the respondents do not know about any partnership with other institutions or persons for smoking prevention and that 41% say there is not any partnership in this domain. Altogether, data show that the local administrative authorities, the teachers and the educational staff valorise the family as the dimension mostly effective in smoking prevention whereas pupils and parents emphasize the school dimensions for it. In addition, teachers tend to give more importance to the pedagogic activities (educational project, classroom health education teaching and good textbooks) whereas the educational staff, pupils and parents give more relevance to the pupils’ social protection. Further work is now going on to put together all these school actors in order to build a serious smoking preventive programme in this Palmeira School Group, where all will feel truly committed.