Primary school teachers’ and pupils’ Health literacy in three districts of Portugal

Abstract

The European project HEPCOM (Promoting Healthy Eating and Physical Activity in Local Communities) supported by the EU’s Health Programme (2008-2013) is the structural backbone to consider the role of health literacy in health promotion. The aim of HEPCOM is to increase the quality and level of local community and school interventions all over Europe on promoting healthy eating and physical activity among children and young people. For this a platform has been constructed to promote the actual use and up scaling of the existing high quality tools, making them easy accessible and usable to incorporate in the daily work of policy makers and professional practitioners. The target audience includes policy makers and professional practitioners that directly benefit from the project, as they will gain knowledge and inspiration from the learning platform (launched recently for experimental testing, September 2014), which can assist them to improve their daily work with health promotion. Therefore it will also have an impact in children and young people and their families. The 21 HEPCOM partners, coming from 16 EU countries, are closely collaborating with local communities. In Portugal we are working with three Municipalities: Braga, Esposende and Guarda. In the sequence of the HEPCOM project, the Portuguese version of the European Health Literacy Scale “HLS-EU-PT: www. http://literacia-saude.info/” will be applied to primary school teachers and pupils of the above three municipalities in order to find out any putative differences in health literacy. Specific solutions will be designed and applied in order to solve critical health literacy deficiencies found in these municipal communities.