School’s Health Promotion orientation and prevalence of unhealthy behaviours in students

The school plays an important role in the healthy/unhealthy behaviours adoption by young people: physical and psychosocial wellness associated with school life, opportunities for personal and social skills development, peers’ influence and social norms, educational achievement, preventive inputs. Actually is largely accepted the comprehensive concept of Health Promoting School (HPS), where different elements contribute to the whole framework: physical and social environment, health education activities, health and psychosocial services, nutritional services, physical activity opportunities, relation with families and community, staff health. The aim of this work is to compare comprehensive HPS orientation measures with alcohol and cannabis use prevalence of Abruzzo’s students (Italy). In 9 high schools taking part in ESPAD project, we collected data on Italian version of CDCs’ School Health Index, that provide scores on 8 areas of HPS. Correlation has been studied by mean of Spearman’s Rho, due to the sample dimension. The results show that prevalence rates for alcohol and cannabis use decrease with better (higher) school scores on Health Education and Physical Activity areas. On the contrary, it seems that they increase with higher scores on Psychosocial Services and Community and family relation: maybe schools improve these last activities in response to risk situation (i.e. large cannabis use or alcohol abuse in the local population). Our work, even if preliminary, outlines an important whole approach to young unhealthy behaviours explanation and prevention in school setting.