Clean Hands For Health - A Short Educational Project For Children

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to present the implementation and process evaluation of a short educational project regarding hand hygiene among kindergarten children. The project was implemented among children from kindergartens from Cluj-Napoca, Romania and included themes regarding why, when and how we should perform correct hand hygiene. It was consisting of one session including discussions, games, and practical activities and testing the way of performing hand hygiene using a special solution for cleaning hands which could be identified using a special device. Moreover, a poster with pictures illustrating the steps for a correct hand washing was posted in the kindergarten in order to remember the children the key messages of the program and to inform parents about them, too. A process evaluation was performed among 250 parents/tutors of the children from three kinder gardens through means of anonymous questionnaires. The results show that the majority of the parents saw the poster of the program, declared that they noticed a positive effect on the behaviour of their children and dedicated time to discuss about the key messages of the program with their children. At the same time, nine out of ten parents appreciated that the program as useful or very useful. The paper analyse strengths and weaknesses of the program and includes suggestions for future activities in this field.

Keywords: Health education among childrenhand hygienechildren

1.Introduction

Health education among children plays an important role in shaping their knowledge, attitudes and

behaviour with regard to several issues which influence their development and health, with important short

term and long term consequences (Lotrean, Popa, Arillo-Santillan, & Florea, 2014; Bartholomew, Parcel,

Kok, & Gottlieb, 2006; De Vries, 1998).

Besides other health relating topics such as promotion of a healthy lifestyle, injury prevention, hand

hygiene for children is crucial to keep them healthy (Lotrean & de Vries, 2016; Valea et al., 2014; Lotrean

& Tutui, 2015; World Health Organization, 2002).

Several studies underline that educational activities for promotion of hand hygiene should create

awareness of the benefits of hand washing, raise the children's motivation, skills and confidence in

performing correct hand hygiene, and enable social norms and environments which encourage this

behaviour. In order to achieve these objectives the educational activities should target both parents and

children and kindergartens/schools are settings which should encourage such educational activities

(Lehotsky et al., 2018; Öncü et al., 2018; Seimetz et al., 2017; World Health Organization, 2018).

2.Problem Statement

A recent review synthesised evidence on the effect of hand washing promotion interventions targeting

children, on diarrhoea, soil-transmitted helminth infection and hand washing behaviour, in low- and middle-

income country settings (Watson et al., 2017). It concluded that few studies evaluated hand washing

interventions targeting children in low and middle income countries and all had various methodological

limitations, but it is plausible that interventions which succeed in changing children' hand washing practices

will have a significant health impacts especially that in several countries a lot of the infectious diseases

burden related to inappropriate hand hygiene is concentrated in this age group (Watson et al., 2017).

3.Research Questions

The research questions rely to how can we use educational methods in order to improve hand

hygiene of children and to which extant they can influence the behaviour of both children and parents with

regard to discussing and putting into practice appropriate techniques for hand hygiene.

4.Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this paper is to present the implementation and process evaluation of a short

educational project regarding hand hygiene implemented among kindergarten children from Cluj-Napoca,

Romania. It presents the main characteristics of the project, as well as the evaluation of the project by

parents. .

5.Research Methods

The project was implemented in several kindergartens from Cluj-Napoca starting with 2010. In 2012

the project was implemented in three kindergartens from Cluj-Napoca. Moreover, a process evaluation was

performed among 250 parents/tutors of the children (45% males, 55% females) from the three kindergartens

through means of anonymous questionnaires. The questionnaire was developed for this study based on the 1103 example of the questionnaire used for process evaluation of other health education programs (Lotrean, Dijk,

Mesters, Ionut, & de Vries, 2010). The issues assessed by the questionnaire are presented in Table 1 .

6.Findings

6.2 Process evaluation of the project

The results of the process evaluation by means of questionnaires among parents show that 94.8% of

the parents have saw the poster of the program displayed in the kindergarten; 78% remembered reading

the letter for the parents, 10% declared that the other parent read the letter and the rest did not remember/

did not know. 1105

A percentage of 49.2% of the parents said that the program stimulated very much the discussions

with the child about the importance and how to perform hand hygiene, while 41.6% declared that the project

stimulated these discussions quite a lot and only 9.2% said that the program did not enable these discussions.

88% of the projects said that the program had positive strong or quite strong effects on the behaviour of

their children. At the same time, nine out of ten parents appreciated the program as useful (70.8%) or very

useful (23.2) and 6% did not know. The mean of the scores got by the project from parents (scale from 1 to

5, with 5 being the maximum) was 4.48.

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performed

7.Conclusion

The project has several strengths- its content based on interactive activities and a suggesting way of

learning, practicing and testing hand hygiene, using of educational materials for informing both children

and their parents. The results for the process evaluation show positive results, which encourage the

continuation and dissemination of the project, despite the limitations which rely on the costs of the special

solution for testing the hand cleaning. Informing the kindergarten officials and teachers about the project

and motivating them for its implementation is very important.

The study has several limitations-it is an exploratory study performed on a limited sample of

parents/tutors of children, the questionnaire used for data collection was not validated before, while the

information relies only on the subjective perception of parents. Future studies should focus on developing,

validating and implementing effect and process evaluation tools for educational activities regarding

promotion of hand hygiene among children.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank to all children, parents and teachers involved in the implementation of the project.

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