A participatory training programme on environment education was developed and applied to 103 junior and senior high school students in a rural community in Vietnam. The programme was aimed at spreading local good practices in both living conditions and community environment. A 22-item action checklist covering 3 technical areas was developed and utilized in the 1- or 2-day training courses organized in cooperation with participating schools and local people. Follow-up activities were undertaken to collect improvements after 1 to 4 months. The students conducted 496 low-cost improvements in multifaceted areas about living and studying conditions and environment protection based on 395 action plans. The emphasis of these improvements was placed on organized storage, study conditions at home and reuse and recycling of resources, as also revealed by the factor analysis of improvement actions. It was confirmed that environment education of young people utilizing a participatory action-oriented approach is effective due to multifaceted improvements, concise participation-procedures, sustained step-wise actions and contribution to local environment protection. It is recommended to develop and disseminate participatory programmes for environment education of young people.

This study investigated the effects of changing the shift system of hospital nurses from 8-hour to 16-hour night shifts on their daily activities. Eighteen female nurses (mean age 38.0) participated in this study for successive two months. For the first one month, they were engaged in the two-shift system with 16-hour night shifts. They were engaged in the threeshift system with 8-hour night shifts for the next one month. The actual amount of work and daily activities were compared between the two systems by means of a time budget study. The results showed that there were no statistically significant differences in "sleep/nap" periods after the night shift and on the day off in night shift conditions. Although the time spent for "eating" just after a night shift was significantly longer after a 16-hour night shift (60.8±41.9 min) than after an 8-hour night shift (43.0±30.9 min), conversely the time for "hobby/amusement in place other than home" on a day off was significantly longer after an 8-hour night shift (234.6±276.0 min) than after a 16-hour night shift (161.5±173.6 min). These results suggested that changing to 16-hour night shifts did not improve the contents of daily activities.