Coordinating the education programming offered by Children’s Community Health

My name is Jack Taylor, and I serve as a Community Health Educator with UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. In my role, I coordinate the education programming offered by Children’s Community Health and spend a majority of my time in schools around Pittsburgh, teaching K-12 students about topics including hygiene, nutrition, and sleep.

One of the moments from my service that has stuck with me the most happened immediately following one of my hygiene education sessions at Clara Barton Elementary School. The hygiene presentation focuses on avoiding the spread of germs and the importance of building consistent personal hygiene habits. As part of the elementary school lesson, I take the group through the steps of proper handwashing, including a portion where we all count to twenty seconds and pretend to scrub our hands. After the first three groups, I walked down one of the hallways to take a break for lunch. As I’m walking down the hall, I could hear a student counting out loud to twenty through one of the bathroom doors off the hallway.

The value of health education as a preventive tool is not usually immediately apparent. This is especially true in younger students, who make it difficult to tell how much they are truly retaining. The hope is simply that whatever information is retained will help contribute to a knowledge base from which each child can slowly but surely build their health literacy skills. In this case however, I was pleasantly surprised to see that one of the core ideas of the lesson was not only retained, but already being put into practice. Measuring instant impact in the world of health education is not always possible or even productive, but seeing it is exciting and extremely gratifying.