Health promotion programs in community and workplaces are increasing in prominence. However, planning and implementing such programs at large bureaucratic institutions are difficult. The PEER-IESS model (Brito & Mendes,2009) is a bottom-up participatory health research and was designed to activate high education communities for the implementation of health promoting contexts, using dialogic strategies and creative means of intervention centered in the academic community.
A healthy university aspires to create a learning environment and organizational culture that enhances health, wellbeing and sustainability of its community and enables people to achieve their full potential. Ottawa Charter (1986) sets out three key strategies: advocacy, mediation and enablement. Also highlights five action areas: build healthy policy; create supportive environments; strengthen community actions; develop personal skills; reorient health services.
Tsouros and collaborators (1998) proposed a conceptual framework that defined healthy universities approach as institutions that develops an environment that supports and promotes health and wellbeing; allows the contribution of the views, skills and experience of the whole university community; increases participation and builds collaborative partnerships; is an effective, evidence-informed mechanism to bring about and embeds cultural change; leads to sustainable changes to improve the health and wellbeing of students and staff; links research, educational, operational and outreach activities and engages students in each; provides a framework that goes beyond interventions that focus on single topics, single target groups or single elements of the university.
Universities are dynamic, complex systems with inputs, processes, outputs and impacts and are part of a greater whole, embedded in local and global communities and interacting with the wider environment. Elements of the university system have interconnectedness, interrelationships, interdependencies and integration between them. Healthy universities concern to draw upon best practice linked to organization development, learning and change.
More recently Okanagan Charter (2015) shared aspirations that health promoting universities and colleges infuse health into everyday operations, business practices and academic mandates. By doing so, health promoting universities and colleges enhance the success of our institutions; create campus cultures of compassion, well-being, equity and social justice; improve the health of the people who live, learn, work, play and love on our campuses; and strengthen the ecological, social and economic sustainability of our communities and wider society. The Charter has two Calls to Action for higher education institutions: embed health into all aspects of campus culture, across the administration, operations and academic mandates, and lead health promotion action and collaboration locally and globally.
Based on these assumptions we formulated the following research question: How conceptualize and design a participatory health research process that allows the activation of a community of higher nursing education to implement a health promoting context and increases the skills for the profession?
To answer the research question, we defined the following objective: To discuss the framework that guide the transformative process of a nursing college into a health promoting context using the PEER-IESS model.
Methods:
PEER-IESS is a bottom up strategy to implement health promotion contexts in high education institutions. Through PEER-IESS model (Education, Engagement and Evaluation Research - Salutogenic Higher Education Institutions), is intended to enable the community mobilization in higher education institutions to develop health promotion and resolution of problems of educational communities through the use of dialogical and creative strategies to promote health intervention centered on the student community (Brito & Mendes, 2009).
Within PEER-IESS model, and through the implementation of PRECEDE-PROCEED model (Green and Kreuter, 1991), used in various cultural contexts, settings, practices and structures of intervention is intended to systematize participatory health research to mobilize youth in large-scale issues related to healthy lifestyles.
PEER-IESS aims to be a participatory health research model to activate university communities in addressing the problems faced by youth, through using Community Mobilization, Peer Education and Peer Research strategies.
Results:
As results the researchers realize that to engage youth in participatory health research networks will be an asset to reduce the gap between young people of different social status, allowing students to have social contact and support socially excluded communities; the value added by participatory action research is to increase awareness of social responsibility to promote youth health and networking between universities will promote institutional commitment because they represent the key mechanisms for change and innovation and organizational forms to provide cooperative learning and reduce the uncertainty of implementation of innovation.
Conclusion:
Higher education has a unique opportunity and responsibility to provide transformative education, engaging the student voice, and developing new knowledge and understanding. PEER-IESS model recognize the link between Peer Education and Peer Research strategies, building capacity for health promotion; increasing academic success; curricular infusion health promotion in the study plan of nursing undergraduate course; formulation of health promotion policies in terms of mission, values and vision in the higher nursing education institution leading to the participation of the entire academic community in building the strategic development plan of the institution.
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