Preparing a plan of action for personal hygiene promotion
You need to make a baseline survey of your community to help you understand the extent of personal hygiene problems. Villages and schools can be surveyed for this purpose. Designing a health survey will need collaboration with others but your input is valuable for structuring the questions so they relate to local knowledge, attitude and practice (abbreviated as KAP). Interviews with the respondents, group discussion and observations are all useful for exploring the practice of personal hygiene. From the results of the survey you should be able to identify the priorities and interventions for improving personal hygiene in your community. You can then design a plan of action knowing the key themes that need to be covered. The plan should include the themes, objectives, type of audience, key messages, etc. This is illustrated in Table 3.1. The first few rows of the table have been completed to demonstrate how you could use a plan of this type.
Table 3.1 Plan of action for personal hygiene education.
| Themes of personal hygiene | Objectives* | Type of audience | Teaching aid | Place | Date | Responsible person |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Body hygiene | To understand the importance for health | Students in elementary school | Poster and oral communication | School X | Date X | Mr X |
| Face hygiene | To prevent trachoma | Mothers with children | Poster and oral communication | Village X | Date X | Mr X |
| Hand hygiene | To prevent diarrhoea | Mothers with children | Poster, oral communication, demonstration | Women's Association Office X | ||
| Oral hygiene | To keep teeth healthy | School children | Poster, oral communication, demonstration | School X | ||
| Hair hygiene | ||||||
| Women's hygiene | ||||||
| Clothes hygiene |
*The objectives of a health promotion activity should target changing or modifying knowledge, attitude, practice and then behaviour.