The Impact of Delivering School-Based Wellness Programs for Emerging Adult Facilitators—A Quasi-Controlled Clinical Trial

A quasi-controlled clinical trial included a university-based supervision course for facilitators of an interactive wellness school-based program. The study aimed to investigate how students that facilitate prevention programs are personally affected by delivering content related to self-esteem, body-image, and media literacy. In total, 66 university students who were either facilitators of preventive programs (intervention group) or non-facilitators (comparison group) completed questionnaires before, after, and three months following the program’s termination. All methods were performed following the Declaration of Helsinki regulations and Consort 2010 guidelines. Participants in the facilitator group demonstrated statistically significant superiority, with large effect size, regarding improvement in identifying advertisement strategies. Weight-related body-esteem, and the reduced impact of media messages’ pressure also had statistically significant superiority, with small effect size. The number of participants with pathological EAT-26 scores (>20) decreased from 5 to 2 in the facilitator group compared to an increase from 5 to 6 (no statistical significance) in the comparison group. Both groups demonstrated statistically significant decreases in eating disorder perceptions and behaviors from baseline to 3-month follow-up. Delivering a prevention program proved beneficial to facilitators, in addition to the target school pupils, and thus may be considered as part of the prevention programs’ effectiveness assessment.