Families and professional caregivers of young children find the support they need through Healthy Child Care Washington, a statewide network of Child Care Health Consultants located in every local health jurisdiction.
Immunization Washington State-supplied vaccines are provided to all children and adolescents under age 19 years regardless of their ability to pay or their health plan coverage.
Local Health Departments Local health departments across the state have programs to link children with special health care needs to necessary services and programs, including linking families to insurance sources, primarily Medicaid. Washington State Parent to Parent and Washington State Fathers Network The Washington State Parent to Parent organization and the Washington State Fathers Network provide a wide range of information, services, and social connection for families of children and youth with special needs.
Adolescent Health Transition Project The University of Washington Division of Adolescent Medicine and the Adolescent Health Transition Project provide education and information through a variety of media and forums on health and life transitions for youth with special needs. Genetic Services: Regional Genetics Clinics Regional Genetic Clinics across the state offer genetic counseling, testing, diagnosis, and treatment services.
National Organization for Rare Disorders The National Organization for Rare Disorders is a unique federation of voluntary health organizations dedicated to helping people with rare "orphan" diseases and assisting the organizations that serve them.
It is a program that helps low-income pregnant women get the health and social services they may need to have positive pregnancy and parenting outcomes. This service is available to health professionals and patients throughout the Pacific Northwest. Office of Newborn Screening The Office of Newborn Screening tests infants born in Washington State for certain treatable disorders that may not otherwise be detected before developmental disability or death occurs.
Testing and follow-up services allow diagnosis before significant, irreversible damage occurs. Directory of Genetic Support Groups This directory provides contact information for support groups for a number of genetic conditions. National Organization for Rare Disorders The National Organization for Rare Disorders NORD is a unique federation of voluntary health organizations dedicated to helping people with rare "orphan" diseases and assisting the organizations that serve them.
Family Village The Family Village is a website for children and adults with disabilities, their families, and their friends and allies. These materials remind parents when it's time for well-child exams and immunizations, and include information on nutrition, growth and development, safety, and parenting issues.
Those who do not meet medical assistance eligibility requirements may be eligible for low cost family planning and reproductive health services through local family planning clinics. The Department of Social and Health Services offers an additional resource for finding a health care provider. Washington State offers health care coverage for teens, pregnant women, and families with dependent children who meet medical assistance eligibility requirements. Women and men who do not meet medical assistance eligibility requirements may be eligible for low cost health care through the Basic Health Plan.
Immunizations and Pregnancy A list of resources for information about vaccines for adults, including pregnant women, is available from the Department of Health's Immunization Program. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention March of Dimes and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have information about the importance of folic acid to prevent birth defects. All women who could possibly become pregnant should consume micrograms or 0.
Folic acid can be found in certain healthy foods, enriched grain products and multivitamin pills. Health care providers have more information.
These messages help women achieve planned pregnancies that are spaced for the best outcomes. Visit our COVID page for the latest updates, vaccine information , testing locations and data dashboard. Harker P Health visitor prevention of child home accidents. Briefing review No1. Contento I. Nutrition education and implications. Journal of Nutrition Education ; 27 :special issue. Colland VT Learning to cope with asthma: a behavioural self-management programme for children.
Patient Education and Counselling 22 : — Schou L , Locker D Oral health: a review of the effectiveness health education and health promotion. Dutch Centre Health Promotion , Utrecht. Community Dent Health 5 : — OpenUrl PubMed.
Health Education Research 5 : — Journal of the Institute of Health Education 30 : 60 — J Public Health Dent 45 : — J Public Health Dent 50 : — Towner E Unintentional injuries in childhood: a review of the effectiveness of health education and health promotion. Pediatrics 67 : — Schelp L Community intervention and changes in accident pattern in a rural Swedish municipality. Health Promotion 2 : — BMJ : — Pediatrics 83 : — Pediatrics 74 : — Br J Educ Psychol 62 : — Midwifery 2 : — Pediatrics 80 : — Journal of Nutrition Education 16 : 19 — Kistin N , Abramson MS , Dublin P Effect of peer counselors on breastfeeding initiation, exclusivity, and duration among low-income urban women.
Journal of Human Lactation 10 : 11 — Journal of Nutrition Education 24 : 4 — Journal of School Health 55 : — Am J Public Health 82 : — JAMA : — Hosman C, Veltman N. Prevention in mental health: a review of the effectiveness of health education and health promotion. Utrecht: Dutch Centre for Health Promotion. High Scope Press , Michigan. Read the full text or download the PDF:. Some important points:.
Call phone number ", and that included tear-off versions of the phone number at the bottom of the sheet. Even those with very low reading levels could read it, it was clear about what services were available, and people could carry the phone number with them -- in some cases for months -- until they decided they were ready to make the call. Something you'll need to decide about recruiting tutors is whether you're going to screen people, or simply train everyone who applies.
There will be some self-screening -- people will come to an orientation or go through the training, and realize that they aren't cut out to be peer educators, or disagree with the philosophy of the program. But there are always a few folks who are eager and enthusiastic It's better for the program -- and kinder to them -- if you can spot them before they make a commitment, and steer them to some other volunteer opportunity more suited to their talents.
One way to deal with this issue is to address it at an initial orientation, explaining that peer education, like anything else, is not for everyone, and that there will be a screening process. You may want to ask people to apply formally for peer educator positions, or your screening may be informal. Screening after training is another option, and will be discussed later in this section. Another screening issue you might want to deal with is whether you'll set any specific criteria of eligibility or ineligibility.
You may decide that all peer educators need high school diplomas, for instance. Substance abuse might be grounds for not accepting someone in a particular program, and may not matter in another. A record of child sexual assault would be an issue in an after-school homework help situation, but might not matter in a senior-to-senior program It's always best to try to anticipate matters like these, and make some decisions about them before you're actually faced with them.
Although a peer education program might be both staffed and administered by volunteers, it is nonetheless absolutely necessary that peer educators be trained and supported. A lot -- perhaps most -- of a tutor's or other peer educator's expertise in working with learners may be gained on the job, but she still needs a grounding in the methods, philosophy, and assumptions of the program and some tools to start with.
How, and to what extent, you provide this base is crucial to the success of your peer education program. It may seem that training is unnecessary in situations where all learners are peer educators and vice-versa, as is the case in some adult literacy programs. In fact, training is especially important in those situations. It may differ from the relatively formal, structured process implied below, but learners need to have some idea of the expectations, the difficulties, and the rewards of sitting on both sides of the educational table.
Training in education or teaching methods can give learners new insight into their own learning process, and change their approach to learning entirely. By the same token, being asked to think about the barriers that learners experience in approaching new ideas or material may enable them to understand and remove some of their own.
Orientation - helping people understand what the program and its issues are actually about -- can be viewed as the beginning of the training, but it can also be used as an introduction to help potential peer educators decide whether they want to enter training. An orientation could be held at the very beginning of training, or even before a training is scheduled, to help people decide whether they really want to become tutors or not.
Some areas you might want to cover in orientation include:. In all orientation and training, it's ideal if you can include both learners and experienced current or former peer educators, in order to give trainees a real picture of what they're taking on. Knowing what to expect will filter out some of those who really aren't appropriate for the job, and will help to make others better.
In addition, the inclusion of learners and peer educators together in a training process underscores the idea that peer education is truly a partnership, and that learners have much to offer as well as to gain. Peer education training itself is meant to prepare peer educators to work with learners successfully.
It should be long enough -- both in total hours of training and in the length of time over which the whole training takes place -- to not only give educators the background and knowledge they need, but to give them time to digest and absorb the material and ideas presented. The numbers in a training group should be small enough so that everyone can get some individual attention, but large enough so that there can be good discussion and role play opportunities.
Eight to ten is usually ideal, with 15 probably being about as big as a group should be. Perhaps most important, the training should reflect the philosophy and methods of the program. If you're asking peer educators to respect what learners already know, then their training should respect what they already know. If you're asking them to use specific methods in working with learners, then those same methods should be used, to the extent possible, in the training, both so peer educators can experience them firsthand and thus have some idea what learners are experiencing , and because using those methods is the best evidence that you really believe in them.
At the end of the training period, you might consider providing closure in one or more ways. Like training, ongoing supervision is an absolute necessity for an effective peer education program. Each peer educator should have a designated supervisor -- whether the coordinator, a paid or volunteer staff member, a more experienced peer educator, or even, in a reciprocal arrangement, another peer educator of similar experience -- with whom she has regularly scheduled meetings to discuss her work, and who is available at other times for help and support when needed.
In most cases, the supervisor would deal with problems between peer educators and learners, or between peer educators. There are at least two ways of looking at supervision. One consists essentially of the supervisor as watchdog, making sure that the staff member or volunteer does her job right, and follows the rules of the organization.
Too often, this has been the model followed in education, the one that generates horror stories of teachers being fired because their skirts were too short, or because they were critical of an assigned text. The other view of supervision sees it as a mentoring relationship, aimed at improving performance through constructive feedback, suggestions, and discussion of real situations and problems.
This is the model generally used in counseling and psychology, and more frequently now in education and medicine. It is, in the writer's opinion, far more effective and useful than the other, and more apt to lead to improvement in performance. In addition to supervision, peer educators need ongoing support.
Some of this can be provided by the supervisor, in the form of advice, encouragement, help dealing with problems, etc. Ideally, peer educators should also have regularly scheduled opportunities to meet together --with or without a supervisor -- to discuss common issues and concerns. The feeling of shared experience and peer support -- as well as the understanding that others share the same difficulties with the work -- can be a tremendous resource for all concerned.
Regularly scheduled in-service training and workshops can provide another form of peer educator support. The opportunity for peer educators to continue to learn techniques, background information, and content will make them more effective, provide them with a benefit, and remind them that they are valued by the program.
The nature of in-service offerings could be determined by educators' own expressed needs, the program coordinator's understanding of what is needed to do a good job, or -- most likely -- a combination of the two.
Even in a program run entirely by volunteers, there need to be personnel policies that cover as many as possible of the situations that might arise with and among peer educators, learners, and the program. It would be ideal if everyone - educators and learners, as well as program staff -- is familiar with these policies from the beginning, so that there are no misunderstandings about the intent of the program. There are a number of areas that these policies might cover.
How many hours a week for how long a time period will you ask peer educators to commit to? Do the hours include particular days or combinations of days? Do they allow for holidays or vacations, and if so, how long? One way to deal with this issue is by having peer educators sign a contract, with the terms spelled out.
Not every program will find this sort of thing necessary or desirable, but many use it, and peer educators find it a reasonable and appropriate way to express their commitment.
In fact, if you're dealing with volunteers, a contract like this is hardly enforceable: it's simply a way of making sure that everyone knows and agrees to the expectations of the program. In order to run the most effective program, it is important for peer educators to know exactly what is expected of them.
Although you hope that everything will go smoothly, it is important to build in ways to deal with problems before the problems occur. Problems that might arise include peer educators experiencing dissatisfaction with the program, learners, or other educators.
Again, it is important to ensure that if problems do arise, there are already methods in place for dealing with them. Especially in programs that serve adolescents, there need to be clear policies about the rights and obligations of learners as well as those of peer educators.
In the best of circumstances, learners should have input into developing those policies , and should know about them -- and be given a copy of them -- at the time they enter the program. Depending on your resources, you might want to prepare a program handbook to give to peer educators, learners, and staff.
The handbook could include not only training -related material program philosophy and mission statement, for instance , but information on personnel policies, volunteer time commitment, security, necessary phone numbers, etc.
If it's done in a loose-leaf format, you could put together different versions for peer educators and learners, if that were appropriate.
A peer education program, like any other, needs to be able to look at what it's doing, figure out how well it works, continually refine those parts of the program that already work well, improve or rework those things that don't work well, and change to meet the changing needs of the target population.
In order to examine itself, a program needs to decide what to look at - what information it will gather, how it will interpret it once it has it - and how to look at it - the way it will gather that information. In choosing what to look at, there are several - not necessarily mutually exclusive - possibilities. Adult literacy and employment training programs often see a huge leap in learners' self-esteem and, consequently, in their willingness to take risks and their ability to persevere and succeed at difficult tasks.
Staff in such programs frequently note that learners begin to dress differently, to hold themselves straighter, to look others in the eye more often, to speak more loudly and decisively. These changes may seem unconnected to the subject matter, but are directly connected to the experience of learning, and can be markers of learners' success. How you look at your information will depend to some extent on what you're looking at.
The more different aspects of the program you're examining, the more varied your information-gathering might be. If you're going to gather information, you have to have a mechanism for collecting that information. Keeping some sort of records is absolutely necessary if you're going to conduct any kind of meaningful evaluation. If your evaluation is going to be really useful, the combination of the information you choose to consider and the way you find it should reflect your goals for the program, your philosophy, and your mission.
A peer education program can be an effective way to reach a large number of people, especially in situations where the population is suspicious of outsiders or there is very little money available for services. Successful programs are based on the assumption that the peer educator-learner relationship is a partnership, and that peer educators may become learners and vice-versa.
Other elements of a well-designed program include:. If you can put together a peer education program that includes these components, you have a great chance of success.
Interactive Sciences is an organization that uses peer education to teach technology. Columbus, OH: Peer Resources Bookstore provides publications on peer education and peer counseling. Correctional Service of Canada. A report on a successful peer education project at the Dorchester Penitentiary New Brunswick. Fax Skip to main content. Toggle navigation Navigation. Improving Services » Section 8.
Chapter Chapter 24 Sections Section 1. Developing Multisector Collaborations Section 7. Establishing a Peer Education Program Section Planning an Adult Literacy Program Section Establishing an Adult Literacy Program. The Tool Box needs your help to remain available. Toggle navigation Chapter Sections. Section 1. Learn how to develop and implement a peer education program. What is peer education? Different types of peer education programs When a peer education program might be useful Different types of peer education programs Peer education programs can take different shapes for different communities, different issues, and different needs.
Some forms that peer education may take include Formal education programs In formal education programs, such as Literacy Volunteers of America, community volunteers or, occasionally, paid tutors from the community help others learn particular skills or information. Outreach programs In outreach programs, the peer educator seeks out learners in the environment where they're most comfortable and most likely to be found.
Workshops In a workshop, a trained volunteer conducts scheduled presentations on particular topics in the community. On-demand or by-request peer education On-demand education is where peer tutors staff a "center" to provide on-the-spot help to those who need it. Some examples of this type of peer education might be: Actual academic education: in adult literacy, for instance, or in English for recent immigrants An especially effective peer education program for Chinese immigrants on the waiting list for a formal English as a Second Language program used tutors who were graduates of the program.
Similarly, high school students might offer homework help to other high school students in an after-school program. Making available information to give learners more control over a particular area of their lives: health, tenants' rights, etc.
Help in understanding and negotiating a bureaucratic or other system: housing, unemployment, or Social Security, for instance. Situation-specific peer education In situation-specific peer education, the goal is to master a specific skill or understand a specific situation.
Positives and negatives of a peer education program Advantages of peer education Peer education programs work well in some circumstances, but may not be the right choice in others. Some particular advantages of peer education programs are: Low resource costs. Since they often use volunteers and have almost no overhead, peer education programs can be run very cheaply.
The potential of a high degree of contact. Volunteers who are themselves part of the community can spread information about programs easily and quickly, and their word will be trusted. Growth for both educator and learner. Because of the equal relationship and the assumption that both peer educator and learner have valuable knowledge and skills, both can gain in knowledge and self-esteem from the education situation.
Circumstances where peer education programs can be useful So when might you want to use a peer education program There are a number of situations where a peer education program could be especially useful: Where other programs are not possible There are several reasons why a professional or formal program may not be an option in a particular circumstance.
Where there is very limited or no funding available In a closed community, where outsiders are not welcome or trusted, or where language is a barrier Where there are simply no professionals trained in the area in which people need to be educated think of those Native American teens and elders Where people have difficulty getting to a program because of physical, geographical, or other constraints in the huge and sparsely-populated rural counties of some western states, e.
Minority communities, where community members may be suspicious of those who represent past or present mistreatment, and where past or present discrimination may not be easily ignored.
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