Purpose of Education

We aim to improve the well-being and health outcomes of the villagers in the villages that we serve through:

Inspiring in villagers a will to improve their health through raising health awareness and improving health seeking behaviour
Equipping villagers with the ability to improve their health by increasing knowledge about disease prevention, alongside practical skills and simple actionables

Current Education Programmes

Our efforts are undergirded by strategies that aim to effect sustainable and enduring impacts. Programmes are designed and implemented with long term feasibility in mind, with the ultimate goal of the villagers being self-sufficient in terms of their health awareness and knowledge. Our educational effort comprises 4 main programmes:

Health Screening Education
Primary School Education
Teachers' Education
Village Health Education

While carrying out these efforts, we also actively assess the relevance of our programmes to our target groups by conducting surveys and focus group discussions with villagers. The feedback given has proven to be invaluable in determining areas of improvement for our programmes. We are always revising our syllabus to ensure that the content taught to the villagers remains relevant. At the same time, we never cease the exploring of new methods to achieve our education-centric goals.

1. Health Screening Education

Targeted and tailored education conducted during our village health screenings for each villager.

Each year, villagers visit the Health Screening Education booth after completing their “Registration”, “Vitals” and “Doctor’s Consultation” station at health screening. This allows Sotheans to have a better understanding of each villager’s social and health profile.

Health screening education aims to provide targeted education that is specific to each villager, customised based on the villager’s lifestyle and presenting health complaints. Health screening education aims to educate villagers on preventive measures to reduce the occurrence of acute illnesses such as dengue and malaria, while simultaneously educating them on topics such as healthy diet to prevent development of chronic illnesses.

For instance, hypertensive villagers are educated on various lifestyle changes that they can adopt to better manage their blood pressure, while villagers who are heavy smokers are educated on the harms of smoking. We aim to educate about chronic conditions such as diabetes as well as acute conditions that villagers suffer from often like diarrhoea. This is achieved through educating villagers about a combination of lifestyle changes, good practices, and basic knowledge of certain medical conditions.

Topics offered at this station include - but are not limited to - diabetes, dengue/malaria, diarrhoea, head lice, healthy diet, hepatitis C, hypertension, smoking, alcohol, family planning, infant care and tuberculosis. Each villager is given a copy of the posters they were taught for them to bring home and refer to.

Efforts to increase the interactiveness in delivering the content include the introduction of game-styled booths, where patients take part in simple games which assess their basic level of knowledge while introducing new concepts to them in an engaging manner.

2. Primary School EDUCATION

In Sothea, we believe that the future of Cambodia rests in the hands of the young.

School Education is one of the key elements in ensuring a sustainable project. We aim to equip children with the knowledge necessary to grow up healthily, so as to prevent a multitude of diseases they might otherwise suffer from.

With the right education for the children, it is hoped that we can:

Improve the quality of health education to inculcate a culture of health awareness within the school
Introduce the children to good and practical health habits
Improve the students’ general understanding towards their health and their body

In the grand scheme of things, these children can then pass on their healthy habits to their future generations, ensuring continuity and sustainability.

During our 2016 Recce trip, our team discovered that a comprehensive health education curriculum was lacking in the schools we served, with the school principals and teachers admitting that health education lessons were seldom conducted, if conducted at all. This was due to both a lack of materials and a lack of time to teach.

As of late, this gap has been filled with Project Sothea’s efforts to provide school children with basic health education. Efforts to implement a long term sustainable programme has led to our developing of a tier-based health curriculum, in the hopes of inculcating good health habits and lifestyle choices from young to reduce the occurrence of preventable diseases in the village. The curriculum has been designed to be progressive (accounting for the maturity of students in each age group), inclusive (non-discriminatory), and would serve to implement targeted changes in attitudes towards health both in school and at home.

In 2019, Project Sothea adapted our curriculum to take the form of Mini-Education Packages (MEPs), each consisting of a short lesson plan and materials for engaging the students during the lesson. These MEPs are suitable for repeated use, hence, encourages teachers to use them even in the project’s absence, increasing sustainability of the education.

To achieve sustainability, the aim of this program is for the Cambodian teachers to ultimately take over the health curriculum. Project Sothea aims to collaborate with teachers and principals to come up with a targeted, progressive and inclusive program based on the current Cambodian health syllabus, supplemented with relevant topics to ensure a well-rounded education.

3. Teachers' Education

This programme involves the teaching of Cambodian teachers by doctors from Singapore.

Teacher’s education aims to equip teachers with the knowledge and skills to aid in their delivery of health education to the students. Such knowledge and skills also include specific training on common diseases and emergencies, to ensure teachers know how to respond to diseases, outbreaks, or incidental dangers in the school environment. In the long term, this collaboration with teachers and various other stakeholders aims to create a meaningful, holistic and sustainable health education curriculum in school, and follow through on its execution.

In our December 2018 trip, our Singaporean doctor conducted education on Spread and Prevention of Infectious Diseases and conducted a basic First Aid Workshop for the Cambodian teachers.

In our December 2019 trip, Teachers’ education was conducted by a Singaporean doctor in two Primary schools. The lesson plan covered the topics of CPR and drowning.

Our team is also working on a detailed booklet containing all the lessons taught in previous years for the teachers to refer to in their own time to refresh their knowledge. We are also working on a summary sheet of important procedures (CPR, choking, drowning, burns etc.) that teachers can quickly refer to in the case of emergencies.

4. Village Health Education

The programme involves working alongside villagers motivated to look after the health of the villagers in their own communities.

Village Health Education (VHE) aims to capitalise on the human resources present on the ground in the villages, namely, the Old People’s Association (OPA) in Srae Ou village and the Village Health Support Group (VHSG) in Roung 1 village.

This involves the education of and cooperation with representatives from the OPA and VHSG, where a lesson plan is delivered to the representatives, in hopes that the representatives will be equipped with the skills and knowledge necessary to better look after the health of other community members by being first responders.

The representatives also act as health ambassadors in educating the community on useful health related knowledge, to contribute to a more comprehensive coverage of the village as well as a more sustainable health environment. VHE also aims to allow the representatives to identify potential conditions that may necessitate medical attention in their house visits. Ultimately, we aim to inculcate within the communities a sense of importance of being responsible for one’s own health.

In 2019, VHE was carried out regarding two main areas – Village Health Education and Referral Follow-up Education.

Village Health Education was designed in line with the specific topics requested by the NGOs. In Srae Ou village, VHE comprised of exercises for the elderly as well as nutrition and healthy diet, targeting the elderly population in the village. In Roung 1 village, VHE covered diarrhoea and malaria, which were especially prevalent in the village. The representatives were given hard-copy materials to reference and to bring with them to their house visits.
Referral Follow-up Education in both villagers consisted of educating the representatives regarding the new follow-up system to be implemented for referral patients from the health screening. The VHSG and OPA were to visit the referred patients and use the follow-up booklet to keep track of the patient’s condition and recovery status since the health screening, as well as to note any other conditions that may be affecting the patient.