Health students to relaunch health prevention in France: gamble of the health service

The health service (service sanitaire in French) was set up in September 2018 by the French government.1 This initiative enforces every health student to carry out a practical exercise of health promotion or primary prevention during their initial training, mainly towards children, adolescents and young adults. For this first year of application, 49 000 students (nurses, physiotherapists, doctors, pharmacists, dentists and midwives) completed their health service. Students from all other health disciplines will be involved from the 2019/2020 academic year.

The health service is a major component of the French national health strategy, whose objective is to develop health promotion, in line with the international guidance of the WHO. This prioritisation of prevention in youth is based on numerous data showing the deleterious impact of health behaviours adopted in adolescence and early adulthood. Indeed, evidence suggests that 17% of the total disease burden for all age groups may be associated…

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