The impact of a newly-designed resilience enhancing program on parent- and teacher-perceived resilience environment among Health Promoting Schools in Hong Kong

Abstract

Background: The Health Promoting School (HPS) approach provides a strong foundation to improve students' overall health, including psychological well-being, which has its roots in resilience. The present study evaluates the effectiveness of a resilience-enhancing programme, building on the concept of HPS among a Chinese population. Methodology: All mainstream schools in a socially disadvantaged region of Hong Kong were eligible, and stratified random sampling was used to recruit both HPS as intervention schools and non-HPS as control schools. The participants included teachers and parents of grade 3 and 5 primary and grade 1 secondary school students (aged 8, 10 and 12 respectively). Validated surveys were used to assess resilience scores in both groups of schools before and after a series of resilience-enhancing activities in HPS, and ANOVA was used to compare the score changes between the two groups. Results: Five primary and four secondary HPS and four primary and four secondary non-HPS were recruited, involving 4918 parents and 602 teachers. Among primary and secondary parents, the HPS group did not report a higher score than the non-HPS group. Among secondary teachers, the HPS group showed significantly higher scores than the non-HPS group (p = 0.023 to < 0.001) Conclusion: The present study is the first to demonstrate the positive synergistic effect of a newly designed resilience-enhancing intervention programme, building on the concept of HPS in schools among secondary teachers in Hong Kong. It was suggested that future initiatives may involve parent networking and school-family collaboration in fostering an even more resilient school environment.