Factors Affecting Consumer Protection Practices on Health Products of Village Health Volunteers, Wang Chao District, Tak Province

Abstract

Background: Village health volunteers (VHV) in Wang Chao District, Tak Province, have carried out work on consumer protection of health products in communities from fiscal year 2017–2019. AS a result, in fiscal year 2020, researchers investaged the factors influencing consumer protection on VHV health products in order to use the finding as a guideline for developing the performance of other VHV groups.

Objective: To study the knowledge, attitude, and behaviour of consumer protection on health products of VHVs, also to study the factors affecting consumer protection on health products of VHVs in Wang Chao District, Tak Province.

Methods: This was a quantitative study between 1 and 31 July 2020. It used VHVs in Wang Chao District who participated in the health consumer protection public health volunteer for health product project. Purposive sampling was selected in six villages, three sup-district, then conveniently randomized at 95% confidence level. The sample size was 40 samples. The statistics were frequency, percentage, mean, and Chi-square by p-value>0.05.

Results: Most samples were aged between 41-50 years, had education at primary school at four and six level, an average family income of 5,001-10,000 bahts, farmer, and were the VHV at five to nine years. It was found that most of them had knowledge about consumer protection of health products at a moderate level, 87.50%, of which 100% of the samples had the most food knowledge on the topic, as they should boil bamboo shoots in boiling water before consumption. In addition, 65% of the VHVs had a moderate score on consumer protection attitudes towards health products. Also 62.50% of them agreed that consumer protection practices in health products should be continually improving themselves. As for the behavior of consumer protection work on health products in the community, 90.00% of the samples were at a moderate level; the highest operating frequency was conducting consumer protection activities for health products in a form of teams and networks. When analysing the relationships between personal factors and behavior of consumer protection practices in health products in the community and the relationships between knowledge of consumer protection of health products and behaviour of consumer protection of health products in the community, it found that there was no statistically significant correlation (p>0.05). On the other hand, the relationship between attitude towards consumer protection of health products and behavior of consumer protection of health products in the community was a statistically significant correlation (p<0.05).

Conclusions: The VHVs possessed knowledge, attitudes, and work behaviours at a moderate level. The factors affecting the VHVs in term of health product consumer protection work were the different attitudes of the volunteers. The characteristics of sex, age, marital status, educational level, average income, occupation, and work duration of the samples, including knowledge, were not the factors that affected operation.