Informed Health Choices Primary School Resources
A textbook and a teachers’ guide for 10 to 12-year-olds. The textbook includes a comic, exercises and classroom activities.
Key Concepts addressed:- 1-1 Treatments can harm
- 1-2 Anecdotes are unreliable evidence
- 1-4 Common practice is not always evidence-based
- 1-5 Newer is not necessarily better
- 1-6 Expert opinion is not always right
- 1-7 Beware of conflicting interests
- 2-1 Treatments should be compared fairly
- 2-2 Comparison groups should be similar
- 2-5 People should not know which treatment they get
- 2-11 Subgroup analyses may be misleading
Details
These resources are designed for late primary school children (10 to 12 year olds). We are currently evaluating the effects of these resources in Uganda. We have randomly allocated half of 120 schools (over 15,000 fifth-grade students) to receive the resources. We will compare the ability of the children in those schools to apply 12 Key Concepts to the ability of the children in the other schools.
The Health Choices Book
This textbook for primary school children (10 to 12 year olds) includes a comic story that introduces and explains 12 Key Concepts, instructions for classroom activities, exercises, a list of key messages, and a glossary.
Chapter 2: Personal experiences
This is an animated version of Chapter 2 of the Health Choices Book.
Teachers’ Guide
This guide includes lesson plans and other resources to help teachers using The Health Choices Book.
Exercise Book
This includes the exercises from The Health Choices Book.
Checklist
This poster with the key messages from The Health Choices Book is a checklist for applying the 12 Key Concepts and a reminder of the most important messages in the book.
Think Carefully about Treatments
Song credits: Informed Health Choices team & Swangs Avenue
The lyrics of this song are another reminder of the key messages in the book.
The Informed Health Choices (IHC) primary school resources include a textbook and a teachers’ guide. We developed the resources iteratively between 2013 and 2015, using user-centred design. We began by identifying Key Concepts that people need to understand and apply to be able to assess treatment claims and make informed healthcare choices. We then determined that 24 of those concepts are relevant to primary school children.
Based on the findings of pilot testing, we reduced the number of concepts addressed in the resources to 12 concepts, with the intention of developing additional resources in the future to introduce new concepts and reinforce understanding of those concepts. This approach is consistent with the principles of a spiral curriculum.
We designed the resources to be taught over a period of nine weeks, with one double lesson per week during a single term and one hour for completing a test. There are three school terms per year in Ugandan primary schools, with school terms ranging between 12 and 14 weeks per term, and lessons are taught in 40 minute periods.
Evaluation details
Nsangi A, Semakula D, Oxman AO, Austvoll-Dahlgren A, Oxman M, Rosenbaum S, Morelli A, Glenton C, Lewin S, Kaseje I, Chalmers I, Fretheim A, Ding Y, Sewankambo NK. Effects of the Informed Health Choices primary school intervention on the ability of children in Uganda to assess the reliability of claims about treatment effects: a cluster-randomised controlled trial. Lancet 2017; Published online May 21, 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)31226-6
Nsangi A, Semakula D, Oxman M, Mugisha M, Kaseje M, Rosenbaum S, Nyirazinyoye L, Austvoll-Dahlgren, Glenton C, Lewin S, Morelli A, Moberg J, Chalmers I, Oxman AD, Sewankambo NK. User experiences of the Informed Health Choices resources to teach primary school children to assess claims about treatment effects in four countries. In preparation.
Oxman M, Rosenbaum S, Morelli A, Glenton C, Austvoll-Dahlgren A, Lewin S, Chalmers I, Nsangi A, Semakula D, Sewankambo NK, Oxman AD. User experiences of the Informed Health Choices resources to teach primary school children to assess claims about treatment effects at an international school in a high-income country. In preparation.
Mugisha M. Piloting primary school teaching resources for informed health care choices in an urban school in Kigali, Rwanda: a qualitative study. A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Public Health in the College of Medicine and Health Sciences, 2016. http://www.informedhealthchoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IHC_Dissertation_final_Printed_Version_Library_20160728.pdf
Nsangi A, Semakula D, Oxman AD, Rosenbaum S, Austvoll-Dahlgren A, Nyirazinyoye L, Kaseje M, Chalmers I, Fretheim A, Sewankambo NK. Does the use of the Informed Healthcare Choices (IHC) primary school resources improve the ability of grade-5 children in Uganda to assess the trustworthiness of claims about the effects of treatments: Protocol for a cluster-randomised trial. Trials, submitted.
Nsangi A, Semakula D, Glenton C, Lewin S, Oxman AD, Oxman M, Rosenbaum S, Austvoll-Dahlgren A, Nyirazinyoye L, Kaseje M, Chalmers I, Fretheim A, Sewankambo NK. Resources to teach primary school children in low-income countries to assess claims about treatment effects: Process evaluation. IHC Working Paper, in press.
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