Introduction

The Health Extension Program is a community-based health care approach which aims at preventing our community from different health problems. Through health education, you can help the people to understand their behaviours, how it affect their health and encourage them to make informed decision/choices for healthy lifestyle. The Health Extension Workers (HEWs) help their community to develop healthy behavior by modifying potential ill health behaviours.

Before implementing successful health education and promotion activities, the real needs of the community should be assessed and identified. Need assessment--is the systematic approach to ensuring that the health education and promotion service uses its resources to improve the health of the population in the most efficient way.

Careful planning is essential to the success of all health education activities. Planning is central to health education and health promotion activities. If you do not have a plan, it will not be clear to you how and when you are going to carry out necessary tasks.

The health of the community will improve only if the people themselves become involved in planning, implementing, and having a say about their own health and health care programs. Participation is a key concept in health education

Communication of innovations is a particular type of communication focused on the spread of new ideas, behavior and practices in the community. This is based on the diffusion of innovation theory. Your communication will be assisted by different communication materials like posters, and current audiovisual methods like television. Health seeking behaviors of community can also be assessed using health belief model constructs.

Sometimes, it is difficult to deal individually with certain health care problems. Advocacy is an important tool to bring such issues in front of policy makers. It will make sure that the people with authority know about these health needs and they can work together with the community to develop the infrastructure that will improve their health.

This Module will help you both with the theoretical underpinning of your Health Education work, and also with some practical ideas of where to start and how to go about your work with individuals, families and with the whole community.

This module contains some sessions that will help you to learn about concepts of health, health education, health promotion, human behavior and different health education and promotion activities like community mobilization. Understanding these issues will help you in your day to day work with you community.

The principal goal of this module is to equip you with the ability to develop, implement and monitor a community-based effective health education program. This will develop good communication skills to attract stakeholders and community members.