Development of Model and Process in Maternal and Child Health among Village Health Volunteers in Nakhon Sawan Province

Abstract

The purposes of this action research were to examine situations related to maternal and child health, to develop and evaluate model and process to promote maternal and child health among village health volunteers (VHV) in Nakhon Sawan province. Samples were 80 VHVs randomly assigned to control and intervention groups with 40 VHVs in each group. The intervention group attended a 9-week program developed by the researchers. Research instruments were comprised of questionnaires on knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding maternal and child health promotion with 20 items in each section. Data were analyzed using frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviation. Dependent t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA F-test) were used for hypothesis testing.

            The result showed that the majority of the samples were females (95.0%), aged 40-59 years (70.0%) with an average age of 46.1 years old. More than half (52.5%) of the samples had primary school education and 67.5 percent worked in agricultures. Results from the maternal and child health model development for VHVs showed the overall appropriateness of the model was at a high level (= 4.50, SD=0.334) with the highest being participations in practices (=4.61, SD=0.397) followed by shared awareness of the problems (=4.50, SD=0.375) and participations in monitoring and evaluation (=4.50, SD=0.395) and participation in analytical thinking (=4.39, SD=0.397). The evaluation of the model showed that knowledge and practices among the samples were significantly higher after the intervention at p=0.05. The comparisons between the control and intervention groups showed significant differences in knowledge and attitudes at p=0.05.

            It can be concluded that the developed model to promote maternal and child health among village health volunteers in Nakhon Sawan province was suitable for improving knowledge, attitudes and practices in maternal and child health among the volunteers and should be replicated for an extensive in the future.