ISHN Initiatives
The International School Health Network (ISHN) is a recently established network but it has already organized or been part of several initiatives and activities. These include:
2008-09
International Webinars
- Five international webinars will be presented in December 2008 with a focus on monitoring and reporting on school health programs, child and youth health and student health literacy. These webinars use a web meeting platform that eliminates long distance telephone charges and permits participants to view the presentation and listen to the presenter through their computers. Additional webinars are being planned, go to our Webinars page for more information. (Sponsored by Centers for Disease Control, in cooperation IUHPE).
- ISHN is cooperating with several national SH associations to publish the School Health Insider, a daily blog that has been clipping items from the journals, media, email lists, blogs and web sites around the world. This service will be offered free of charge until January 2009, after which, membership in ISHN or the partner national organizations will be required to view the postings. For more information, go to on Blog page.
- Similar to Wikipedia and the Knol papers being published on Google, ISHN has started publishing international wikis that will collect peer-reviewed collaborative summary statements of the evidence and experience on a host of topics in school health promotion. Graduate students, new researchers and practitioners reflecting on their work will be approached to prepare five page summaries with links to research reviews and case studies. Funding for the first two wikis has been secured on School Health Effectiveness and School-based Substance Abuse Prevention. Contact ISHN if you would like to be an author, reviewer or commentator. Authors will present their papers in ISHN webinars.
- ISHN is working with several indigenous organizations and SH associations to conduct an international dialogue on SH promotion in aboriginal schools and communities. The goal of the project is to develop a more relevant cultural approach and set of principles for SH promotion in these communities.
- Using wiki technology similar to Facebook and using a template used in other business and professional networking web sites, ISHN will be building a wiki (International School Health Profiles) to house profiles of countries, international networks and UN agencies. Contacts for each country and organization will be asked to prepare a brief profile of their work and the technology as well as ISHN will facilitate this new form of web-based communication. Add your organization and eliminate some of the email from your in-box using this new shared work space platform.
2007-08
- Members of the ISHN worked with IUHPE to prepare two book chapters on challenges in school health promotion and on settings-based health promotion that will be published by Springer of New York.
- Members of ISHN also cooperating with IUHPE and the Health & Learning Knowledge Centre of the Canadian Council on Learning to organize an international symposium, web-scan inventory and collection of research evidence and reports on settings-based approaches to health and learning. See an example of the selected research reviews and landmark studies in school health research. Also see the list of selected research studies and reviews that are organized by themes and topics of school health promotion.
- ISHN was invited to join a Technical Committee on the role of the school in promoting health, social development and learning that is being jointly operated by the World Health Organization, UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank. ISHN members are taking the lead on several tracks of inquiry that will present papers to a meeting to be held in June 2007 in Vancouver.
- ISHN is also collaborating with IUHPE and the Canadian Association for School Health to organize a pre-IUHPE workshop on school health (June 8-10) as well as several sessions and meetings at the IUHPE 2007 Conference in Vancouver (June 10-15).
2006-07
- IUHPE and ISHN held a series of workshops on the use of the protocols and guidelines for health promoting schools (hosted at the 79th Annual Conference of the American School Health Association).
- ISHN contributed to the publication and dissemination of the special issue of the IUHPE Promotion & Education on school health (Edited by Ian Young, European Network of Health Promoting Schools).
- ISHN organized a workshop/teleconference on School Health Research (Hosted by the Health & Learning Knowledge Centre of the Canadian Council on Learning and the Canadian School Health Research Network) where delegates validated a School Health Research Agenda.
Prior to 2006
- A School Health Workshop and several sessions at the 2004 Melbourne conference of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education (Hosted by the Australian Association of Health Promoting Schools) led to initial discussions about the formation of ISHN.
- An international Meeting at the 2005 Ottawa School Health Conference (Hosted by the Canadian Association for School Health) concluded with an agreement to form ISHN.
