DepEd, DOH vow to address health issues affecting students

The Department of Education (DepEd) and the Department of Health (DOH) have both committed to address health issues directly affecting school-aged children in the country, such as teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, and mental health illnesses.

In an ambush interview on Tuesday, Health Secretary Ted Herbosa said that he met with Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte on Monday to forge a stronger collaboration to better protect the health of students.

“We met her for school-aged health interventions. We talked about influenza-like illness. I'm talking about surveillance of infectious diseases whenever there is high absenteeism. We talked about HIV and intervention that we can do in terms of health education and literacy. We talked to her about teenage pregnancy. We also had a long discussion on substance abuse and mental health because we had this series of suicide that had happened in our schools,” he said.

“We also talked about nutrition by the way because there are a lot of children in schools who are undernourished,” he added.

For her part, Duterte said that both agencies will implement stress management programs and counseling services for the students to help address not just their health issues in the physical aspect, but also their mental health and well-being.

“Napagtanto namin na hindi lahat ng mga suliranin sa paaralan ay resulta ng kalidad ng edukasyon. Marami sa mga ito ay sanhi ng pisikal at mental na kalusugan, na isa sa mga pinakamahalagang aspeto na dapat nating bigyang-pansin upang matiyak ang pangkalahatang pag-unlad ng isip, katawan, at damdamin ng ating mga mag-aaral,” she said in a social media post.

(We realized that not all school problems are a result of the quality of education. Many of these are caused by physical and mental health, which are one of the most important aspects that we must pay attention to in order to ensure the overall development of the mind, body, and emotions of our students.) — Giselle Ombay/RSJ, GMA Integrated News