From leadership research to district action: School Health Services and Health Education Curricula in Greece: Scoping Review and Policy Plan

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: review-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

The new generation’s health and wellbeing is of paramount importance: it constitutes United Nations’ priority, complies with Children’s Rights and responds to the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. In this perspective, school health and health education, as facets of the public health domain targeted at young people, deserve further attention after the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic crisis in order to revise policies. The key objectives of this article are (a) to review the evidence generated over a span of two decades (2003–2023), identifying the main policy gaps by taking Greece as a case study, and (b) to provide a concrete and integrated policy plan. Following the qualitative research paradigm, a scoping review is used to identify policy gaps in school health services (SHS) and school health education curricula (SHEC). Data are extracted from four databases: Scopus, PubMed, Web of Science and Google Scholar, while the findings are categorized into the following themes following specific inclusion and exclusion criteria: school health services, school health education curricula, school nursing, all with reference to Greece. A corpus of 162 out 282 documents in English and Greek initially accumulated, is finally used. The 162 documents consisted of seven doctoral theses, four legislative texts, 27 conference proceedings, 117 publications in journals and seven syllabuses. Out of the 162 documents, only 17 correspond to the set of research questions. The findings suggest that school health services are not school-based but a function of the primary health care system, whereas health education retains a constantly changing position in school curricula, and several deficiencies in schoolteachers’ training, coordination and leadership impede the implementation. Regarding the second objective of this article, a set of policy measures is provided in terms of a problem-solving perspective, towards the reform and integration of school health with health education.

Study methods

This scoping review aimed to explore and systematically map the school health services and school health education curriculum in Greek primary, secondary and higher education, seeking to identify key problems, drawbacks and disadvantages in policy implementation. The objective, therefore, of this work was to locate certain gaps in the current literature and legislation as for the above-mentioned fields of action and then to highlight the gaps that need to be covered by policymaking, adopting a problem-solving perspective. This purpose is served by synthesizing the evidence thematically. The search strategy utilized the following categories: school health services, school health education curricula, school nursing, integration and critical pedagogy, all with reference exclusively to Greece, since this country is taken as a case study. The search followed two stages, one search with English and one with Greek key-terms. Irrespectively of the language employed, the terms remained identical, i.e., “health education & Greece” “school health & Greece”, “school health services & Greece”, “school health education & Greece”, “health programs & school & Greece”, “health interventions & school & Greece”, etc.

Limitations

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A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Select one recurring district decision. Publish the decision owner, evidence requirements, consultation process and appeal route; test the process on a bounded low-risk decision. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Track decision time, unresolved objections, documented reasons, appeals and access differences. Review whether the process changes who can participate and who carries the burden. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Pelagia Soultatou; Stamatis Vardaros; Pantelis G. Bagos. School Health Services and Health Education Curricula in Greece: Scoping Review and Policy Plan. Healthcare (2023-06-07). https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11121678

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.