This document discusses health education, including definitions, content, and methods. It defines health education as a process that encourages healthy behaviors through education. The content of health education includes topics like human biology, hygiene, nutrition, disease prevention, family health, and use of health services. Methods for delivering health education involve individual approaches, group approaches, and mass approaches. Principles for effective health education include establishing credibility, stimulating interest, encouraging participation, motivating learners, ensuring comprehension, providing reinforcement, using active learning, and setting examples.

1. Health Education: Definition,
Content and Methods
Dr Solomon O.O.
Community Medicine Department
Ekiti State University

2. Definitions
• No single acceptable definition of health education.
Thus, a variety of definitions exist:
• WHO defined health education as:
• A process aimed at encouraging people to want to be
healthy, to know how to stay healthy, to do what they
can individually and collectively to maintain health, and
to seek help when needed (Alma Ata
Declaration,1978).

3. Definitions (cont)
• Health education is the translation of what is known
about health into desirable individual and community
behaviour patterns by means of an educational
process.
• Health education is the part of health care that is
concerned with promoting healthy behaviour (WHO,
Education for health, 1988)
• Some health workers use the term ‘Information,
education and communications’

4. Content
• Human biology
• Hygiene
• Nutrition
• Disease prevention and control
• Family health
• Mental health
• Prevention of accidents
• Use of health services

5. Human biology
• Structure and functions of the body
• Sleep, rest and exercise for physical fitness
• Effects of alcohol, smoking and drugs on the body
• The best place to teach is school, reaching millions of
students through continuous in-depth learning.
• Reproductive biology – of current interest

6. Hygiene
• 2 aspects – personal and environmental
• Personal - bathing, washing of hands and toilet, care of the
nails, feet and teeth, spitting, coughing, personal appearance,
inculcation of clean habits in the young. To be commenced
very early in life, and through school age
• Environmental – domestic and community – cleaning of the
home, fresh air, ventilation and light, hygienic storage of
water, disposal of waste, avoiding pests (rats, mice and
insects)

7. Nutrition
• Choose optimum and balanced diets
• Remove prejudices
• Promote good dietary habits
Issues covered include
 Breastfeeding
 Weaning
 Food taboos and superstitions (esp. for infants and pregnant
women)
 Traditional food allocation pattern within families
 Link between diet and disease

8. Disease prevention and control
• Role of health education proven in the eradication of cholera,
typhoid and TB etc., in the Western world
• H/E on prevention and control of locally endemic diseases
(one of PHC activities)
• Immunization
• Polio eradication,
• Roll Back Malaria Initiative,
• HIV/AIDS, Breast Cancer etc.

9. Family Health
• H/E on role of the family’s social and physical
environment and its lifestyles in disease
leading to:
• Prevention of disease
• Early diagnosis
• Care of the sick family member
• Family’s self-reliance – child-bearing, family planning,
influencing their children in adopting healthy lifestyle

10. Mental Health
• The change to an industrial age with its
accompanying ‘social coldness’
• Crucial periods of external pressure e.g.
puerperium, child at different entries of
schools, choosing a future career, partner,
starting a new family, time of widowhood etc.

11. Prevention of accidents
• Safety education on the 3 main areas – home,
road and place of work
• To include other departments – engineering,
police, managements of companies,
information etc.
• Provision of a safe, clean and orderly
environment
• Tackle carelessness

12. Use of health services
• Awareness of available services e.g., family
planning, immunization, screening
• How they can utilize them
• Health care resources
• Bridge communication gap by encouraging
feedback

13. UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children Report 1989
outlined the following as basic health information for
every family:
• Child spacing
• Breastfeeding
• Safe motherhood
• Immunization
• Weaning and child growth
• Diarhoea diseases
• Respiratory infections
• House hygiene

14. Practice
Audiovisual aids
• Teaching materials or aids are used to help
you and support the communication process
in order to bring about desired health
changes in the audience.
Methods of health education
• Teaching methods refers to ways through
which health messages are used to help
solve problems related to health behaviour.

15. Audiovisual aids
Audiovisual aids
Visual aids
Not requiring projections : chalkboards, posters,
charts, flannel graph, exhibits, specimens, etc.
Requiring projections : slides, film strips
Auditory aids
Radio, tape-recorder, microphones, amplifiers,
earphones
Combined A-V aids
Television, sound films (cinema), slide-tape
combination

16. Methods
Health
Communication
Individual
Approach
Group Approach Mass Approach

17. Individual Approach
Personal contact
Home visits
Personal letters
Group Approach
Lectures
Demonstrations
Discussion
Methods
Mass Approach
Radio
Television
Internet
Newspaper
Printed materials
Posters
Direct mailing
Health museums
and exhibitions
Folk methods
- Group discussion
- Panel discussion
- Symposium
- Workshop
- Conferences
- Seminars
- Role play/socio-drama

18. Individual Approach
• This can be done by the doctor in the consulting
room or the nurse in the health facility. It can be
at home during home visit.
• When individual come to health facility because
of an illness, we take the opportunity to educate
on diet, personal or environmental hygiene etc.
• The health educator must create an atmosphere
of friendship and allow patient to freely talk and
ask questions.

19. Individual Approach
• Advantage: patient listen more readily to the
physician because of the confident they have in
him.
• Avenue to persuade individual to change his
behaviour.
• It provides opportunity to ask question in terms
of specific interest,
• Disadvantages: its given to only those who came
to the facility
• Few numbers are reached

20. Group Approach
• Groups can be of many kinds: school children,
pregnant women, nursing mothers, workers in
an industry, market women etc.
• Subject of health education must relate
directly to the group.
• Suitable methods of delivering the health
education must be selected
• Types: Lecture, demonstration, group
discussion

21. Lecture
• A carefully prepared oral presentation of facts,
organized thoughts and ideals given by a
qualified person.
• The group should not be more than 30 and
the talk should not be more than 15 to 20
mins.
• Audio-visual aids can be used to make it more
effective

22. Disadvantages
• Participants are minimally involve
• Learning is passive
• Do not stimulate thinking or problem solving
capacity.
• Comprehension of the participants varies
• Health behaviour of the listeners is not
necessarily affected.

23. Demonstration
• A carefully prepared presentation to show how to
perform a procedure or a skill.
• The demonstrator involve the audients in
discussion
• He arouses the interest of the audience.
• He persuades the audience to adopt
recommended practice.
• He upholds the principle of learning by doing.
• Can bring about desirable change.

24. Discussion Methods
Types
• Group discussion
• Panel discussion
• Symposium
• Workshop
• Role playing
• Conferences and Seminars

25. Mass Approach
• They are effective way of educating the whole
community or general public.
• They are didactic method of communication
• They are useful in transmitting message to the
remotest places.
• They can reach large number of people.
• They give high returns for time and money.
• They create awareness for health knowledge
but not sufficient to bring about change in
behaviour.

26. Types of Mass Media
• Newspapers
• Printed material
• Posters, billboards, signs
• Direct mailing
• Health museums and exhibitions
• Radio
• Television
• Internet

27. Principles
• What are principles?
• Principles are defined as laws, truths and
bases for action- simply put-Rationale for
practice
• H/E practitioners have from time to time
enumerated principles guiding the practice of
the profession.

28. Characteristics of Principles
• THE SOURCE/ORIGIN OF THE PRINCIPLES
-Science ( i.e. evidence-based)- They have
been proved to be factual and conducive to
action.
-Philosophy- A system of beliefs resulting from
search for knowledge about life which guides
somebody’s behaviour or way of life.
• Principle should be universal.

29. Principles
• Credibility
• Interest
• Participation
• Motivation
• Comprehension
• Reinforcement
• Learning by doing
• Known to unknown
• Setting an example
• Good human relations
• Feedback
• Leaders

30. The principles
• CREDIBILITY- This is the degree to
which the message to be
communicated is perceived as
trustworthy by the receiver.
• H/E must be based on facts- It should
be consistent and compatible with
scientific knowledge.

31. 2.
• INTEREST- It should address
their “felt-needs” (the need
they feel about themselves).
• This will stimulate their
interest and win their maximal
participation.

32. 3.
• PARTICIPATION-The people
should be encouraged to work
actively with health workers in
identifying their own health
problems and developing
solutions and plans to solve
them.

33. 4.
MOTIVATION-
• This is awakening the desire in a person to learn
(there is fundamental desire to learn in every
individual). To motivate individual means to MOVE
somebody to action.
• MOTIVE means reason for doing something. Two
Types Of Motives:
1.PRIMARY MOTIVE
-Innate desires driving people into action e.g.
hunger and survival.

34. CONT’D
2.SECONDARY MOTIVE
• These are created by outside forces e.g.
praise, love, rivalry, rewards, punishment
e.t.c. E.g. Immunization Status and Free
Education.
• Motivation is contagious; one motivated
person may spread motivation throughout
a group of other people.

35. 5.
COMPREHENSION.
• One major barrier to passing across instruction in
the process of H/E is using words that are not
understood by the target population.
• The level of understanding, education and
literacy of the target population should be known
so as not to speak above them. E.g. telling an
illiterate diabetic patient to cut down starchy
food.

36. 6.
REINFORCEMENT
• Repetition at interval is
necessary.
• If there is no reinforcement there
is every possibility to forsake
already accepted instruction.

37. 7.
LEARNING BY DOING
• The people should be involved in active
learning.
• A Chinese proverb says “IF I HEAR, I
FORGET; IF I SEE, I REMEMBER; IF I DO, I
KNOW”.
• E.g. A mother being educated on how to
prepare and give ORS.

38. 8.
KNOWN TO UNKNOWN
• HEALTH educator must be patient and consistent
in passing across his message.
• He must follow the rules of teaching which are
“from the concrete to the abstract”; “from the
particular to the general”; from the simple to the
more complicated”; from the easy to more
difficult and “from the known to the unknown”.

39. 9.
SETTING AN EXAMPLE
• Health educator must set a
good example for the people
he teaches. E.g. smoking
habit

40. 10.
GOOD HUMAN RELATIONS
• Building good relationships
with people goes hand in hand
with developing
communication skills.

41. 11.
FEEDBACK-
• Getting feedback from previous teaching
helps to know the effectiveness of the
exercise and also helps to modify the
message and method of communication
if need be.

42. 12.
GOING THROUGH LEADER
• Psychologist have shown that we learn best
from people whom we respect and regard.
• To be successful in Health education, the
educator needs to go through the key
stakeholders in the target community- the
political, traditional, religious leaders e.t.c.

43. Conclusion
• Health education is a major component of
Primary Health Care.
• The need to understand the definition,
content, methods and principle of health
education for all health workers especially
those involve in Primary Health Care is not
negotiable

44. Thank you.
Any Question