The South African National Educator Wellness Study (SA-NEWS)
type: CreativeWork
description: Background: Previous studies have shown that South African (SA) teachers are a population at risk for non-communicable diseases. Health screening, primarily through wellness days, is a popular strategy to improve health by identifying risk factors or disease. In addition, studies show the effectiveness of tailored letters and SMS text message-based interventions for weight loss, physical activity (PA), glycaemic control and hypertension management. Aim: To investigate whether the addition of a tailored print letter and SMS-text communication intervention, in addition to the standard-of-care feedback following a wellness day, would result in greater changes in health risk factors than the standard-ofcare. The feasibility and acceptability of the SMS-text messages was explored and the school health environment analysed to ascertain the impact of school environments and policies on teachers’ health risk status. Finally, the feasibility and helpfulness of employing an adapted intervention mapping (IM) approach to a complex health behaviour change intervention was reported. Methods: Twenty seven schools were selected from a list provided by the Department of Basic Education’s provincial educational authorities. Schools were grouped according to socioeconomic status and geographic location and randomly assigned to either intervention (n=13) or control (n=14) groups. A total of 571 teachers participated in the first set of the wellness days. At the completion of the wellness day, teachers in the intervention schools were asked to select one of 5 health goals they wanted to manage and to rank their top 3 (of 6) barriers preventing them from achieving the goal. In addition to the targeted wellness day feedback, teachers in the intervention group received a single printed tailored letter with advice relating to their goal and barriers. This was followed by at least 8 tailored advice SMS-text messages over 5 months. All teachers were invited to attend the second wellness day a…
abstract: Background: Previous studies have shown that South African (SA) teachers are a population at risk for non-communicable diseases. Health screening, primarily through wellness days, is a popular strategy to improve health by identifying risk factors or disease. In addition, studies show the effectiveness of tailored letters and SMS text message-based interventions for weight loss, physical activity (PA), glycaemic control and hypertension management. Aim: To investigate whether the addition of a tailored print letter and SMS-text communication intervention, in addition to the standard-of-care feedback following a wellness day, would result in greater changes in health risk factors than the standard-ofcare. The feasibility and acceptability of the SMS-text messages was explored and the school health environment analysed to ascertain the impact of school environments and policies on teachers’ health risk status. Finally, the feasibility and helpfulness of employing an adapted intervention mapping (IM) approach to a complex health behaviour change intervention was reported. Methods: Twenty seven schools were selected from a list provided by the Department of Basic Education’s provincial educational authorities. Schools were grouped according to socioeconomic status and geographic location and randomly assigned to either intervention (n=13) or control (n=14) groups. A total of 571 teachers participated in the first set of the wellness days. At the completion of the wellness day, teachers in the intervention schools were asked to select one of 5 health goals they wanted to manage and to rank their top 3 (of 6) barriers preventing them from achieving the goal. In addition to the targeted wellness day feedback, teachers in the intervention group received a single printed tailored letter with advice relating to their goal and barriers. This was followed by at least 8 tailored advice SMS-text messages over 5 months. All teachers were invited to attend the second wellness day a…
author: Joseph, Lester Ezra
date published: 2019
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:23:45Z
provider: University of Cape Town
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Department of Human Biology

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/30381