Educational Priorities of Self-Care Based on Needs Assessment of Household Health Ambassadors

Abstract

Background and purpose: Self-care is recognized as a fundamental approach in the field of providing, maintaining, and promoting health in individuals, families, and society. Providing essential training in the field of self-care is one of the important tasks of primary health service systems to the community, including household health ambassadors. On the other hand, determining the educational needs of self-care in each society should be based on the educational needs assessment in the same society. Therefore, the present study was conducted to determine the educational priorities of self-care using the educational needs assessment of health ambassadors. Materials and methods: The current study is a cross-sectional study (descriptive-analytical). The research community included household health ambassadors living in the Golestan and Mazandaran provinces. Entry criteria included being family health ambassadors, being between the ages of 20 and 60, and volunteering to enter the program. Also, the exclusion criteria included the health ambassador's unwillingness to participate in the evaluation. The study tools included a demographic questionnaire and a researcher-made questionnaire on "self-care educational needs" for health ambassadors. The health ambassadors' needs assessment questionnaire was the result of self-care educational priorities based on a general survey of the community, which was scored by the health ambassadors. Data analysis was done using SPSS version 20 software. U-Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to analyze the data. Results: Results showed that the average age of health ambassadors participating in the study was 38.11±9.64 years. 987 people (57.8 percent) of them were health ambassadors of Golestan province and 721 people (42.2 percent) of them were health ambassadors of Mazandaran province. Also, concerning the participants' gender, 1439 people (84.3%) were women and 269(15.7%) were men. The educational needs assessment showed the top 10 priorities among self-care education topics determined by household health ambassadors, including stress and anxiety, healthy eating, life skills, parenting skills, water hygiene, inactivity, depression, skeletal problems, and lack of vitamins. , and oral and dental health. It was also shown that there is a statistically significant difference between different subgroups of participants such as gender, place of residence, education level, occupation, and ethnicity with self-care educational priorities in household health ambassadors (P<0.05). Conclusion: The findings of the study showed that mental health issues such as stress, anxiety, and depression, as well as issues related to people's lifestyles, such as healthy eating, inactivity, and skeletal problems, were determined among the needs-based priorities for community education. Due to the limitation in financial and human resources, it is necessary to conduct self-care training based on the needs assessment of the society, because, on the one hand, an important part of the health needs of the society will be answered. On the other hand, the educational subjects that have priority will be the target of educational programs.

Keywords

• self-care
• need assessment
• health ambassadors
• health priorities
• educational priorities