Learning about the Respiratory system with HAPPY

This year, we’ve brought back the high school leadership program, Health Awareness Prevention Promotion by Youth (HAPPY). Students are working towards gaining the skills and knowledge necessary to create a health panel, an informational brochure on what they’ve learned, and a health fair at the end of the school year to showcase their knowledge and educate the community. In this January session, students worked with medical students from Loyola University and the University of Chicago to learn basic medical knowledge about the body’s respiratory system while PV Program Coordinator Faith Hong, helped the students learn important leadership and project management skills and practices like communicating effectively, working as a team, and the collaboration and cooperation necessary to make a great project.

For the medical session, The medical students discussed the processes and functions of the respiratory system. PV students learned about the various diseases that can attack the lungs and the techniques doctors use to detect diseases, listened to the breathing of a healthy and unhealthy lung, and finally learned more about the effects of smoking. The students acknowledged how bad health habits can lead to lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. After the discussion, our students had the opportunity to practice what they learned in two hands-on workshops where they identified the symptoms of a heart attack and learned how to administer CPR, and also examined and compared lungs from cadavers of a healthy adult, a healthy child, and a smoker.

We are very grateful for the help and support from the medical students of Loyola and U of C who went the extra mile to bring in specimens for our students to learn from. The session was very informative and we look forward to the projects our students will be working on with all this new knowledge. Our second health fair is in the works! Please stay tuned for more details!