At the recent ERS Congress, the ELF team were proud to see Ed Powell, Chair of the ELF Youth Group, co-chairing a workshop on ‘Lung Health in Childhood: a public approach to preventing lung disease before it starts.’
On the 11 September, Ed Powell, Chair of the ELF Youth Group, co-chaired the Wednesday workshop session “Lung health in childhood: a public approach to preventing lung disease before it starts.” Alongside the European Respiratory Society (ERS) President, Monika Gappa, the pair invited a number of speakers to help highlight what more can be done to support young people with lung conditions. The session was an opportunity for clinicians working within lung health to understand how young people can be better supported in clinical practice.
A number of speakers shared their knowledge and experiences within the session. To begin the session, Erik Melen discussed the importance of childhood for lung health. Many questions arose from this talk, with clinicians eager to understand more about the topic. As the session progressed, the focus shifted to how young people can become involved in advocacy through taking part in projects.
Healthy Lungs for Life for Schools was one of the projects discussed. The Healthy Lungs for Life for Schools initiative aims to encourage children to make healthy choices from a young age and reduce the burden of lung disease in the future.
Paola Pierucci became involved with the project after working within a busy lung health clinic, where she became frustrated with having to regularly prescribe expensive lung health equipment to support the lungs of people that had smoked tobacco for many years. From this, it was clear that many people were unmotivated to improve their lung health and education was an issue. After working on pilot projects within Healthy Lungs for Life for Schools and educating children about lung health, Paola hopes programmes such as this can enable children to become lung health advocates and raise awareness of its importance to those around them. In the future, she hopes to see lung health education implemented into all stages of the school curriculum to reduce the burden of disease in the future.
“Children are so passionate in everything they get involved with and they are able to strongly advocate for themselves and those around them. They have a firm belief that anything is possible. Every child can become a ‘lung health hero.'” – Paola Pierucci.
Elvis Ndikum from Global Youth 4 Clean Air and Climate Health Action in Cameroon, also spoke in the session. He commented on the importance of involving young people in projects and the childhood lung health being prioritised on the public health agenda. He highlighted that more should be done to encourage young people to make their voices heard within the field of lung health as this can have a sustainable impact.
“There has been significant progress on awareness as well as growing evidence that childhood lung health is linked to many risk factors. Yet, urgent action is still needed to bring young people on board and address the most pressing risk factors for childhood lung health, such as air pollution, climate change and tobacco use.” – Elvis Ndikum.
One of the ways that ELF aims to prioritise childhood lung health is through the ELF Youth Group. The ELF Youth Group provides an opportunity for young people to share their perspectives on what is needed in the future to support others in the same situation. Presenting at conferences such as the ERS Congress is just one example of how ELF encourages young people to get involved. However, there are plenty of other opportunities that young people can promote the importance of lung health in childhood. Find out more about the ELF Youth Group’s plans for the future and how to get involved here.
ELF, through Lungs Europe, are also a partner of the FRESHAIR4Life project which aims to prevent the harm caused by air pollution and tobacco in adolescents in disadvantaged populations. Find out more about the project.
