Improving the Health Literacy of Children and Adolescents

Health Awareness and Prevention Education in German Schools

Every year, almost half a million people in Germany receive a cancer diagnosis. At the same time, scientists keep telling us, that many types of cancer are highly preventable diseases. This also refers to other very widespread diseases, like type 2 diabetes.
We cannot prevent all cases of cancer. However, we have the knowledge to keep more people healthy in the future.

• This knowledge must disseminate more widely.
• We should promote individual health literacy and health awareness as early as possible, and start with children and adolescents.

Our project “FIT in Gesundheitsfragen”: In co-operation with the German Helmholtz Research Center for Environmental Health, the German Cancer Research Center started a school initiative in 2018, aiming at children and adolescents, and their teachers.
Responsible divisions are the National Diabetes Information Service at Helmholtz Munich and our team from the National Cancer Information Service at Heidelberg. The project is funded by the “Initiative and Networking Fund” of the German Helmholtz Association (https://www.helmholtz.de/en/about-us/the-association/initiating-and-networking). 

Our main objective is to make students aware of the connection between health and illness at an early age, so they can take on the responsibility for their own health. Teachers gain access to up-to-date knowledge from research on cancer and diabetes biology, prevention, and the treatment of diabetes and cancer, but also a sound background on promoting health literacy, including quality criteria for reliable health information.  

Train the trainers: We train teachers in workshops (mostly online, due to Covid-19) and provide innovative didactic materials and suggestions for their classes: conventional text with science based information, but also online videos, interactive plays, science “mysteries” or other forms of gamified information.

All teaching modules aim at lower, middle and upper grades of general education schools. Their content deals with practical questions of children’ and adolescents’ daily life: What should I do, if someone offers me a cigarette and puts me under pressure to be “cool”? Why does my classmate wear this funny button on her arm and refuses my chocolate?
Another example gives insight into cancer research and science based treatment: Students and their teachers can solve a mystery game. It starts with the question, why the leukemia patient Ms. Miller has to take two pills every day. The answer to the riddle comes from an accidental mishap in the lab of Peter Nowell and David Hungerford leading to the identification of the Philadelphia chromosome, then follows the long and winding path of research on cancer cell metabolism and targeted therapies, and ends up with Brian Druker’s success story of Imatinib/Gleevec.

Perspektive: Until midterm of the project, we had provided most of the teaching units on cancer and diabetes. 14 seminars, workshops and educational conferences were held, reaching almost 400 teachers, and more events are to come this winter. A regular newsletter addresses teachers as well as educational experts and governmental authorities. Within the next months, we will add more teaching units, e.g. on quality criteria for health information or in depth information on cancer research. We will finalize several readers for teachers, e.g. on health literacy and eHealth in Germany – and hope to continue the project further on, with regular updates and new content.

“FIT in Gesundheitsfragen” is online at https://www.diabinfo.de/schule-und-bildung.html (Diabetes, in German and Turkish), and https://www.krebsinformationsdienst.de/service/fit-in-gesundheitsfragen/projekt.php (Cancer, in German).

Contact details for further questions:

Susanne Weg-Remers, German Cancer Information Service, s.weg-remers@dkfz.de