Medical Students as Health and Environmental Promoters

by Salma Galal, M.D.

Incentives for the children

Although incentives were discussed previously with the students as regard to their positive side or drawbacks, students found that it worked better if they rewarded the children for their newly adapted healthful behavior. As the SHE-Group worked with no resources, some students honored the pupils in front of the school or the class in announcing their distinction. Others prefered to give them small incentives - sometimes out of their pocket money - especially for the very young. Incentives used were the following:

• children' books with stories from UNICEF (in Arabic)
• common books for the class to initiate a class library
• pencils or rubbers
• tooth-brushes or tooth-pastes
• handkerchiefs
• pictures

Minimal assessment of the health status of the children was tried as long as the local medical authorities were cooperative. Medical students were interested to fortify the link between the school, the health unit and the parents. In some cases lack of resources made this link difficult.

As for women, they were encouraged to continue their literacy classes. Often they had to face the community making fun about their attendance of literacy classes. Their absenteism was due to dialemma between their own interest and the views of the community. Some found health education per se to be an incentive, however, others preferred to consult the medical student for health problems.

Some of the students asked their professors to visit their village and examine patients in the health unit. They even organized these sort of meetings.

Health education could not be performed without responding to health complaints or needs of the target groups.

Working without any monetary resources, one of the students found out that when speaking about bacterial infections - even if it was in the content of science in school books - children could not imagine it. One of the incentives she could offer, was to take them to the health unit in the laboratory in order to look through the microscope.

The SHE-Group had to find possibilities of providing the schools with microscopes, to make it clear for pupils that there are germs which are not seen by the mere eye.

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