SUVA, Fiji, March 23 (NNN-AGENCIES) – The Fijian government will include cancer into school curriculum, to increase awareness on the disease.
Fiji’s Minister for Education, Heritage and Arts, Rosy Akbar said today (Saturday), she intends to include cancer into the Fijian school curriculum’s Family Life Education.
“Currently we are so prescriptive in our curriculum services in Fiji, because we are preparing children for exams,” she said at the Continuing Medical Education Programme in “Win Against Cancer” in Nadi, Fiji’s third largest city.
It would be part of the Family Life currently taught in school systems, she said, adding that, children can actually be mouth pieces to take the information back home.
Akbar said, children would understand the diseases, especially if their own parents were patients, and it would help them be more proactive in identifying forms of cancers and urging medical treatment and family support.
“Children at a very young age must be made to understand what’s happening around them,”she added, and noted that with the current multitude of diseases being faced, cancers and non-communicable-diseases had created a double burden.
Akbar said many cancer patients in Fiji were still seeking medical treatment at extremely late stages and that information about the different cancers need to be well understood by grassroots Fijians.
The Ministry of Health works directly with community health workers, who have for the first time, received a budgetary provision by the Fijian government, under the 2018-2019 National Budget.– NNN-AGENCIES
