TY - JOUR
T1 - An educational intervention in rural Uganda
T2 - Risk-targeted home talks by village health workers
AU - Moon, Charles
AU - Alizadeh, Faraz
AU - Chaw, Gloria Fung
AU - Mulongo, Mary Immaculate
AU - Schaefle, Kenneth
AU - Yao-Cohen, Morgen
AU - Musominalli, Sam
AU - Paccione, Gerald
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Global Health Center of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the Division of General Internal Medicine and Dept of Medicine, Montefiore Medical Center.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Global Health Center of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine , and the Division of General Internal Medicine and Dept of Medicine, Montefiore Medical Center .
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Authors
PY - 2020/6
Y1 - 2020/6
N2 - Objective: Evaluate the effectiveness of home talks (HTs), a novel model of health education delivered by village health workers (VHWs) with primary-level education to rural African mothers. Talk recipients were assessed by health census to be at risk for ill-health in one of 5 ways: malnutrition, diarrhea, respiratory disease, HIV, and poverty due to family size. Methods: Each participant received a pre-test, immediate post-test and delayed post-test on their assigned HT topic and a pre-test and delayed post-test on a randomly assigned control topic. Differences in scoring were examined against controls and over time using paired t-tests and general linear regression analysis, respectively. Results: Subjects lost knowledge gained from the HTs over time, but what they retained at 3 months was far greater than what they learned about the control topics (p-values <0.0001), independent of subjects’ educational level. Conclusion: Targeted HTs to people with health census-identified risk factors resulted in learning and significant retention of knowledge. Practice implications: Positive behavioral change resulting from health education has been shown in diverse contexts. This personal model of home talk education by VHWs targeting vulnerable families is flexible and effective and may be used to improve community health in other impoverished settings worldwide.
AB - Objective: Evaluate the effectiveness of home talks (HTs), a novel model of health education delivered by village health workers (VHWs) with primary-level education to rural African mothers. Talk recipients were assessed by health census to be at risk for ill-health in one of 5 ways: malnutrition, diarrhea, respiratory disease, HIV, and poverty due to family size. Methods: Each participant received a pre-test, immediate post-test and delayed post-test on their assigned HT topic and a pre-test and delayed post-test on a randomly assigned control topic. Differences in scoring were examined against controls and over time using paired t-tests and general linear regression analysis, respectively. Results: Subjects lost knowledge gained from the HTs over time, but what they retained at 3 months was far greater than what they learned about the control topics (p-values <0.0001), independent of subjects’ educational level. Conclusion: Targeted HTs to people with health census-identified risk factors resulted in learning and significant retention of knowledge. Practice implications: Positive behavioral change resulting from health education has been shown in diverse contexts. This personal model of home talk education by VHWs targeting vulnerable families is flexible and effective and may be used to improve community health in other impoverished settings worldwide.
KW - Community health talks
KW - Community health workers
KW - Health census
KW - Non-communicable diseases
KW - Patient health education
KW - Rural Africa
KW - Uganda
KW - Village health workers
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U2 - 10.1016/j.pec.2020.01.015
DO - 10.1016/j.pec.2020.01.015
M3 - Article
C2 - 32035739
AN - SCOPUS:85079007288
SN - 0738-3991
VL - 103
SP - 1209
EP - 1215
JO - Patient Education and Counseling
JF - Patient Education and Counseling
IS - 6
ER -
