Data obtained from Engineering Career Center (ECC) Faculty of Engineering UGM showed that 58 percent of 611 graduates had no fit health condition which led to failures in certain job vacancies. Besides, 8 of 22 students of Vocational School UGM had failed in apprenticeship opportunities due to health problems.
According to Prof. Dra. Yayi Suryo Prabandari, MSi, PhD, this illustrated the fact that health issues were still need to be addressed by the academic community, including the students who are still young.
“There is an increased trend of lifestyle diseases in productive age. Many graduates are not accepted for jobs not because they’re not competent but not healthy,” she said in a talk show, Implementation of Health Promoting University in Indonesia, on Wednesday (18/9) in the auditorium of Faculty of Medicine, Public Health, and Nursing UGM.
This condition does not much differ from the trend of diseases in Indonesia which is dominated by non-communicable diseases (NCD) such as stroke, systemic heart diseases, and diabetes, which can actually be prevented and managed with change of lifestyle. Non-communicable diseases also became a burden to the National Health Security plan.
“Non-communicable diseases actually emerged after a long time, which can actually be changed by changing the lifestyle besides medicine and therapy,” she said.
She explained five aspects that became the factors for certain non-communicable diseases in Indonesia, namely smoking habit, alcohol consumption, blood pressure increase and obesity, less nutrition, and lack of physical activities.
To address the problem, UGM in the past few years has campaigned a healthy lifestyle through the Health Promoting University (HPU), which is an approach to create a learning environment and organisational culture that can improve health and work productivity.
At UGM, HPU focuses on 5 things: physical activities, healthy diet, prevention of cigarettes and drug use, mental health campus, and campus participation to conduct early detection and monitoring of risk factors for non-communicable diseases. These are realised in activities such as the declaration of a smoke-free zone on campus, sporting facilities such as jogging track, model food composition plate and traffic light food warning, and also socialisation involving staff, lecturers, and students.
The development of HPU at UGM stemmed from the initiation of Asean University Network (AUN) to design a healthy campus framework in August 2016. UGM attended the meeting and joined the team to design the framework; hence, the HPU at UGM. Through the health promotion programme, a significant change is expected to arise in terms of health levels of UGM academic community.
“The benefits of the HPU are that we have productive staff and excellent students. If all is positive, later in life we can be active senior citizens,” she said.
Director of Health Promotion in Health Ministry, dr. Rizkiyana Sukandhi Putra, M.Kes, added the output of the health promotion programme was not only the health, but also the well-being. Amidst the Industry 4.0, she expected disruption also emerged in health area to push the health promotion in the future. “We hope there will be disruptions arising in the health promotion that we do,” she said.