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Interdisciplinary Approach from Undergraduate Pre-Health Students in Children's Health Educational Initiative-A Pilot Community Intervention

Sophie R Zhao, Siyuan Cao, Patrice Lin, Jeffrey Yenor, Regina Lam, Ellen Chang, Jianghong Liu

The importance of interprofessional training in healthcare to improve quality of care and health outcomes has been increasingly recognized. This pilot study used an interprofessional and interdisciplinary team of undergraduate prehealth students to set up a unique community partnership with a local elementary school in developing and implementing a nutrition/exercise educational intervention. Our results suggest that children as young as 8 years old are capable of learning new information related to the benefits of particular food groups and are capable of retaining this knowledge for 6 months and that an intervention program as short as one hour every few months stand to make significant impact on children’s knowledge about proper nutrition and healthy lifestyles. Our results suggest the potential benefits of further expanding the short-term intervention into a longer-term community-based curriculum targeting a younger age group than commonly practiced in previous interventions. Furthermore, this pilot study suggests that undergraduate pre-health students can form an interprofessional and collaborative team to take an active role in the dissemination of nutrition knowledge in the community.