Healthfest determined to change pre-schoolers' lifestyle

Anuradha Kodagoda

Children are considered to be the backbone of every country's future. Therefore, in every democratic State children's access to education, healthcare and shelter have been secured as a fundamental human right. Therefore, every child has a right to be healthy and act healthy.

However, does that happen in reality? A study conducted in 2006 by Katulanda found the prevalence of diabetes over the age of 20 to be 10% (Katulanda et al 2006) and there are many cases that reported that children even below the age of 15 had contacted non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, heart diseases, high blood pressure and many others.

"The upcoming Healthfest introduces a new lifestyle for the general public to practise healthier activities in their day-to-day lives. Today, many Sri Lankans are facing the problem of having to live with diabetes, high blood pressure and heart diseases. Some have experienced stroke and are disabled.

It is a known fact that approximately 13 percent of the population is diabetic and a higher percentage have high blood pressure.

There are 350 deaths reported per day in the country of which 250 deaths are reported to be due to non-communicable diseases. If we continue the existing life patterns especially food habits, this erroneous trend will develop further. So it is high time that we take into consideration this matter at a national level," said Dr. Pushpika Abeysekara, a member of the College of Community Physicians of Sri Lanka. "Earlier though we tried in many ways to make awareness of the importance of having a healthy lifestyle among the public through educational workshops, seminars, demonstrations and other ways, none of them met with success.

Therefore now, we hope to start from scratch, and in the upcoming Healthfest we have given special attention to pre-schoolchildren which we believe is the ideal segment of population to educate what a healthy lifestyle means," he stressed."As I mentioned earlier, if you count the number of people you know who are affected by non-communicable diseases, you will realise that almost every family is affected.

Once a person gets affected they have to take lifelong medication. Sometimes diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease can co-exist, which makes continued medication a costly burden to families. All the hassle people are suffering sometimes throughout their lifetime is due to erroneous food habits that he/she has been practising for sometime which could have been eliminated easily. Due to the lack of awareness people had harmful food habits which led to many non-communicable diseases," the doctor said.

"There are about nine events that we have planned at the Healthfest, especially targeting the pre-schoolchildren, which may not be confined to the event, but which we hope to continue as a community welfare project.

There are more than 15 pre-schools that we have selected who have shown interest to participate at the Healthfest and gradually we hope to expand the program among the pre-schools islandwide. This is what we call Primordial Prevention which means that through it we eliminate the generation of risk factors.

As pre-schoolers are the only ones who have not yet come to the danger of non-communicable disease we believe it is the ideal segment of population to practise a healthy lifestyle.

Although the Super 8 concept was primarily planned for adults, we propose to introduce this concept to the pre-schoolers too in a different format.

Nowadays children are used to many computer and play station games. Therefore, we hope to introduce a new games arena which promotes physical activities, such as, Koppara Koppara pipigngna, gas maru, obstacle relay, statue dance and many others.

Also, there are few fruit and vegetable stalls that provide a variety of local fruits and vegetables for the children to taste, such as guava, uguressa, naminang, gadiguda, mora and woodapple. Vegetable stalls display a variety of vegetables arranged in an attractive manner.

By this activity we hope to persuade them to eat at least two fruits and five servings of vegetables per day.

The drawing of the food plate is another novel activity that we intend to introduce for pre-schoolers and teachers. Instead of the food pyramid, the modern concept is the food plate, so we hope to educate pre-schoolchildren, teachers and parents.

Potting of plants is another activity that we hope to introduce at the event and through this we expect children to merge with the environment and to educate them on the importance of loving the environment while enjoying it at the same time.

In addition, there are programs arranged to measure the weights and heights of the children and show where they are using enlarged growth monitoring charts, an area for oral health, where the College of Community Dentistry will screen the children for oral diseases and give instructions and demonstrations of tooth brushing and fun games on brushing.

There will be fun filled events that children can really enjoy.

A hand washing activity is also organised and it is considered as the most successful health awareness program that ever took place in the world.

The training of pre-school teachers on the technical aspects prior to the event will be performed by our team of Consultant Community Physicians (Approximately 30 pre-schoolteachers will be volunteering for the activities in the pre-school area on the 17th)," Dr. Pushpika added.