The Philippines officially embraced the 2007 World Health Organization-Child Growth Standards (WHO-CGS) for evaluating the health of Filipino school children, as endorsed by the National Nutrition Council (NNC) Governing Board through Resolutions 2 and 3 of 2008 and 2009, respectively. The WHO introduced these international growth standards in 2007 to enhance the screening, surveillance, and monitoring of school children and adolescents worldwide. These standards emerged in response to the growing global issue of childhood obesity, coinciding with the release of new CGS guidelines for infants, preschool children, and adolescents.
The WHO-CGS is now the established method for determining the nutritional status of Filipino school children aged 5-19 years old. In this process, the responsibility for conducting these assessments falls squarely on the shoulders of school nurses and teachers. Additionally, school administrators, specifically the school heads, play a pivotal role by ensuring the availability of essential tools for measuring height and weight. Ideally, a beam balance scale equipped with a height scale is the preferred instrument for these measurements. In cases where such a tool is unavailable, bathroom scales can substitute for weight measurements, and steel tape can be employed to measure height accurately.
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