Building on last year’s School Challenge success, Novo Nordisk Australia exceeded their results and reached around 4,750 schoolchildren with the message of a healthy lifestyle in order to prevent type 2 diabetes.

Motivated staff changing diabetes
The School Challenge has become a key TakeAction! activity in Australia and New Zealand and now fits in very well with the Changing Diabetes theme. It is quite motivating for the employees to help change the future of diabetes. Obesity is a highly relevant topic in Australia at the moment, particularly in kids, so this programme focusing on bringing healthy food and exercise into the lives of schoolchildren really demonstrates that we are taking leadership in helping to address such a significant and growing health problem.

Exceeding last year
For last year’s School Challenge, we contacted diabetes nurse educators directly to reach 900 children across 12 schools in Australia and New Zealand.

Aiming at an even better result, we decided this year to approach the Australian Diabetes Educators Association (ADEA) - the professional association for diabetes nurse educators - to partner with us to recruit their members to run the program on the day, and to ask them to approach and nominate a school themselves. We prepared recruitment flyers for each state in Australia that were sent out by the ADEA, and interested educators replied to ADEA.

Overwhelming interest
The interest was overwhelming. In the end, 40 diabetes nurse educators (37 in Australia, 3 in New Zealand) ran the program in 51 schools (42 in Australia, 9 in New Zealand).
All educators received a kit and almost all received training.

We offered the Novo Nordisk sales representatives the opportunity to attend a school session in their location. They helped run logistics on the day and helped run the games with the kids. Head office based staff was also offered an opportunity to attend a school that was not already covered by one of the representatives, and 20 Novo Nordisk employees accepted the offer.

Another success to build on
On World Diabetes Day, diabetes nurse educators (DNEs) went to their chosen school at a time pre-arranged with the school. They started the session with an approximately 20 minute talk on diabetes, healthy eating and physical activity and then selected from the games we had provided in the kit and played these with the kids.

Approximately 4,750 children ended up receiving messages about diabetes, healthy eating and physical activity, and 5,000 show bags were created and distributed directly to the participating schools.

There was a relatively even geographical spread of schools across both countries. Some of the DNEs are based in major hospital clinics, while others are attached to small rural diabetes centres in remote areas.The sessions targeted years 5 and 6 that is equivalent to the final two years of primary school, kids aged 10-11 years.

The feedback from participants in both countries was great, and we will definitely capture much learning that will help us to make this project even bigger and better next year!