DOHA: The Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) has recently organized, in collaboration with Ministry of Education and Higher Education, Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC) and Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), two workshops on the new WHO growth charts among the independent school students between the ages of 5 and 19 years.
About 80 participants comprising male and female nurses from the independent schools and nursing supervisors from PHCC participated in the workshops.The aim of the workshops was to train the participants on how to use and apply the new WHO growth standards between the ages of 5-19 years.
The workshops also shed the light on malnutrition cases including weight gain or loss, identify students’ growth problems, establish a special database system on students’ growth pattern in addition to constructing a control and monitoring system of students’ health conditions especially with regards to obesity and overweight and how to register these data and maintain them in the students’ health records at the health clinic or at school.
Worth mentioning that the two workshops come as part of Qatar National Nutrition and Physical Activity Action Plan (2011-2016) that aims to reduce the burden of obesity and non-communicable chronic diseases which are related to heart diseases, diabetes, high blood pressure among the citizens and residents alike. It should be noted that these growth charts have been applied since 2010 among the children from birth up to 5 years in healthy child clinic at PHCC centres.
