Child-to-child approach in disseminating the importance of health among children –A modified systematic review

Health is a paramount issue in every society. Children's lives are more dominated by two main environments, which are the home and the school. Children's health is most affected when they encounter disease-laden environments; hence, schools have high influence in their health. Schools also serve as health promoting agencies and have a strong bidirectional relationship between a child's holistic wellbeing and education. Children are the best teachers who have the charisma to be influential change agents in reciprocating what is taught to them as healthy behavior. This paper is focused on the child-to-child approach in disseminating the importance of health among school-age children and the importance of molding them into change agents. The objective is to systematically review all literature works answering the question “Is Child-to-Child approach effective in disseminating health information's among school children?”. Using critical appraisal skills program (CASP) framework and a data extraction form, articles were retrieved from different databases, including Scopus, CINAHL, PubMed, ProQuest, and EBSCOHost. These articles were published between 2003 and 2020. After critically appraising 85 articles based on the inclusion criteria, only 16 were found appropriate for addressing the purpose of this review. Major results of the review were that each of the studies had tested the effectiveness of the child to child approach using different health education topics such as prevention of worm infestation, eating behaviors, first aid measures, hand hygiene practices, importance of Vitamin A, and eye care. Studies reported that this approach empowered children with better health related knowledge and practice. This paper concludes that child-to-child approach plays an important role in disseminating health to children either as siblings, peer groups, and to parents.