Promotion of Social Inclusion in Secondary Schools: Effects on Adolescent Health

On 26 September 2007, the Ministry of Youth Development hosted Professor George Patton, VicHealth Chair of Adolescent Health Research, University of Melbourne and Professor Susan Sawyer, Chair of Adolescent Health, University of Melbourne as part of their seminar series.

Sound attachments to school and family are the most potent factors promoting positive youth development and health. This seminar described the implementation of a school-based programme - The Gatehouse Project - designed to shift the social environment of secondary schools in a favourable direction, and serves as as an illustration of how research might bring different arms of government together.

It marks a new direction in health promotion and ways to work with complex systems and settings that influence health.

About the Speakers

Professor George Patton is the VicHealth Professor of Adolescent Health Research at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute’s Centre for Adolescent Health.

He has a clinical background in Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and a research background in epidemiology. Under his leadership, the research group at the Centre has undertaken a range of community studies of common mental health and behavioural disorders of young people.

The most well-known is the longitudinal study known as ‘The Victorian Adolescent Health Cohort Study’, now in its ninth wave of data collection on its 2,000 participants over a 14-year period. Others are community-based interventions such as ‘The Gatehouse Project’, an intervention to improve social relationships in secondary school and which brought a 25% reduction in substance use, anti-social behaviour and very early sexual intercourse.

Professor Susan Sawyer holds the inaugural Chair of Adolescent Health at The University of Melbourne. As Director of the Centre for Adolescent Health at the Royal Children’s Hospital, she is responsible for leading Australia’s largest centre of excellence in adolescent health which aims to advance knowledge, practice and policy in relation to young people and their health.

A paediatrician by training, Professor Sawyer’s research interests lie at the interface between clinical medicine and population health, where she has published over 100 peer review publications and 20 book chapters. She has a particular interest in education and training.

More Information

Below (under "Related documents") you can download the presentation made by  George Patton and Susan Sawyer.

For more information on this seminar, email us at mydinfo@myd.govt.nz


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