Development of Health Literate School in Health Region 7

Abstract

Health literate school is a strategy to promote health literacy among school-age children, but it has not been effectively developed in a clear direction. This action research aimed to develop a health literate-school model in the health region 7 by enrolling 22 elementary and high schools in the responsible areas. Samples include: 1) co-developers of the model including executive personnel, school-health teachers, public health professionals, 22 participants per group, and 2) 1,733 Pratom 4 – Mattayom 3 students. This study was conducted during January 2019 to June 2020, and divided into three phases, which included 1) pre-study phase including: the students' health literacy survey using questionnaires, growth assessment based on weight, height measurement, and interview of the co-developers;2) developmental model implementing phase including: information return, potential development (for executive personnel, teachers, public health workers), plan& implementation along with visiting-empowerment and improvement in accordance with result of post-implementing evaluation; and 3) conclusion and reflection phase. Collected data were then analyzed for descriptive statistics including frequency, percentage, average, standard deviation, minimum and maximum as well as an inferential statistic paired t-test. The qualitative data were also analyzed for content analysis. The results revealed that pre-development health literacy score of 30.5%, 39.5%, 23.8% and 6.2% were at poor, fair, good and excellence levels, respectively. The percentage of student who had proportional height and weight was 65.3.Health literacy scores were found to increase after the health literate school approach was developed with statistical significance (= 2.80, S.D. = 14.27, 95% CI = 2.13-3.48, p-value < 0.001).Additionally, the students, among 67.3% were found increasing in weight/height proportion. The results conveyed that the health-literate-school developmental model could increase health literacy and growth proportion amongst the students.