Students propel health program forward as organisers call for more funding

Without a new source of funding, this will be the last year children in our region benefit from Students As LifeStyle Activists (SALSA), an program which improves kids' health through peer-led nutritional education.

Last year local non-profit HealthWISE brought the SALSA program to our region, delivering it to four schools with support from the University of Newcastle and NSW government.

The roll-out was successful enough to entice a fifth school, Armidale Secondary College, to join in this year.

But HealthWISE executive manager of strategy Sally Urquhart says SALSA's short-term funding contract with the NSW government could derail the program even as it picks up steam.

"This is the second year of [the government's] two-year grant, and we'd love this to be sustainable so we're looking at options for the future," Ms Urquhart said.

"Nobody set out to make a two-year program. We want to embed this for local students as it is in Sydney."

Undeterred, the uni students delivering the program are diving in headfirst while the adults continue the search for funding solutions.

SALSA is an evidence-based program which trains university students to create and deliver interactive health lessons.

The uni students then deliver these lessons to local year 10 students, who then go on to develop their own class for year 8 students.

"It's a great opportunity to gain some skills in leadership while also getting involved in the community," Newcastle University nutrition and dietetics student Sophie Cann said.

SALSA has been running in Sydney schools since 2005 and has been proven to improve students' health by encouraging physical activity and healthier eating habits.

Ms Urquheart says the program is effective because students learn from one another instead of their usual "boring" authority figures.

"You bring in university students - and they're cool - and that makes a huge difference in the classroom in engaging those year 10s," she said.

On top of the health education benefits, SALSA also improves students' communication and public speaking skills.

Director of the University of Newcastle Department of Rural Health, professor Jenny May, says she hopes to see the collaborative program become a mainstay of the curriculum.

"We're very excited that the SALSA program which had four schools last year, is now involving five. We really want this program to be re-funded and continue succeeding because we see the advantage to the students involved," Dr May said.

"It's so important to support our young people with healthy lifestyle information in a way that it can be received, but a big benefit here also goes to our [university] rural immersion students studying physio, nutrition, and dietetics, who are getting to be the passers-on of information."

Continuing the SALSA program would be a great tool for the whole the New England region to help fix our persistently high rate of obesity.

One of the program's creators, professor Smita Shah, says giving rural communities consistent access to health education and information readily available in Sydney is one of SALSA's most important goals.

"The importance is actually the sustainability of programs such as this. It's not about somebody coming in and doing it one-off," Dr Shah said.

"The idea of the partnership and why it's important is to have it sustained over the years so we can make a difference, especially in our public schools."