The effectiveness of animation-based occupational health training on knowledge, attitudes and practice in occupational health for thai health workers

Abstract

Background: Occupational health education is an important strategy for the prevention and control of occupational health problems in a hospital setting. Health workers (HWs) typically face obstacles to their training, often due to time restrictions and their workload. Objectives: 1) to test the effectiveness of classroom training using PowerPoint slides with supporting narration and watching animation to improve the knowledge, attitudes and practice (K-A-P) of HWs in occupational health; 2) to prove that training using animation-based is not that different from training using narration-based, particularly for different educational levels. Materials and Methods: The non-randomized control group pretest-posttest design was conducted in a community hospital in Samutsakorn province, Thailand. The participants were divided into two groups by voluntary participation in each class, with an unknown method of training. The pretest and demographic data were conducted to examine their background, baseline knowledge, attitudes and the practice of occupational health for HWs. Then, the first group started training using a PowerPoint presentation with supporting narration in the classroom by an occupational physician, while the second group was trained by watching animation. After they finished each training session, the same questions on the posttest were retested. The Mann Whitney U test was utilized to compare the score between two methods while the pretest and posttest scores were compared with the Wilcoxon Signed Rank test. Results: The participants in this study consisted of 94% of HWs who came to training. They were mostly female, middle-aged, graduated with a Bachelor’s degree or higher and worked close to patients, such as nurses. There were no statistically significant differences between two groups in terms of background, baseline overall score and each K-A-P score of occupational health for HWs. After training, using each method in each group, the posttest of K-A-P and overall score of both groups were increased and the differences in scores were statistically significant when compared to their pretest scores (p-value <0.001). HWs who trained with animated-based material, particularly well-educated health workers had an increased K-A-P score, higher than narrationbased training, but not different in terms of statistical significance. Conclusion: Animation is an effective media and does not differs from conventional methods. It was suitable for occupational health education among HWs. The production of new and modish alternative occupational health training media should be encouraged in this field. It could be applied to help to enhance HWs achievement to protect their health at work. © JOURNAL OF THE MEDICAL ASSOCIATION OF THAILAND| 2019.