Summary

In this study session, you have learned that:

1. Health education messages can be facts, information, ideas, opinions, or a course of action that you convey to influence individual or community behaviours.
2. You should always develop your messages in advance of conducting any of your health education sessions. When you develop your health messages, you should keep in mind the learning objectives, the available resources, and the characteristics of your audience — and then select the most effective health education methods to use.
3. Different messages are needed to influence different target groups, and you must prepare a message which is tailored to each specific target group.
4. Once the message is developed, the next step involves disseminating the message to the respective audiences that you have chosen. However, health education is much more than dissemination of the message. It should be supported with a wide range of other supportive activities.
5. Recording health education activities is one of the most important tasks for health professionals. All your health education activities should be recorded and reported using standard documentation and reporting formats.
6. Monitoring is the systematic collection and analysis of data on work performance. It will help you to check whether activities have been undertaken as you planned. Monitoring will help you keep your activities on track.
7. In health education, input, output and process should each be monitored. Input monitoring deals with the resources required to run health education activities. Output monitoring deals with checking whether your expected health education activities have been delivered as planned. Process monitoring checks whether you are doing the right activity that will help you to achieve your learning objectives.