The Prenatal Environmental Health Education Collaboration
Prenatal exposures to common environmental toxicants such as lead, pesticides, Bisphenol A, second-hand smoke and numerous other substances in our day-to-day lives pose significant reproductive and developmental health risks. There is a recognized need to develop educational strategies aimed at communicating these risks and promoting actions to limit exposures, before and during pregnancy. The PEHE Collaboration brings together key national organizations and experts in prenatal clinical care, public health, environmental health and health communication, to address this need, and to advocate for more protective policies to reduce toxicants use and ensure healthier indoor and outdoor environments.
The goal of the PEHE Collaboration is to improve our understanding of factors that promote and inhibit the uptake of prenatal environmental health preventive care activities across diverse prenatal care, community, occupational and environmental contexts in Canada. This understanding will inform development of patient-centred environmental health education and other knowledge translation strategies suitable for clinical practice.
EduTOX
The EduTOX Video Challenge is a national, bilingual youth video contest aimed at raising awareness of environmental health risks amongst youth. The EduTOX Video Challenge called on youth aged 14 to 22 to make 1-2 minute videos about toxins in our day-to-day lives, their potential health effects, and how we can avoid them. Through collaboration with various Canadian youth, education, health and environment focused organizations, including Health Canada’s Risk Management Bureau, EduTOX was a highly successful campaign that ran in 2016 and 2017. The key objective of EduTOX was to raise awareness of potential risks, and of actions that Canadian youth can take to protect their health.
EduTOX emerged out of a key recommendation from the Prenatal Environmental Health Education (PEHE) Forum, which was to design and implement a youth focused environmental health literacy program and support innovative social media campaigns, competitions or other activities aimed at engaging youth. Adolescents and young adults are a particularly important population to target for environmental health education due to the significant impacts environmental exposures can have on their health and that of their future children over the long term, as well as the potential that exists to change behaviours around purchasing practices, diet and other day-to day activities before they become lifelong habits. It is also be anticipated that by engaging youth as educators, messages will be better received by their peers and ultimately will be more likely to affect personal change and encourage them as the leaders and decision-makers of tomorrow.