Effect of health education on health coordinating volunteers of Birjand health center to promote the community healthy life styles.

The main goal of health coordinating volunteer's program is the promotion of their knowledge and skills through an active and favorable instructional system. Holding different training courses on healthy life styles covering nutrition, mobility, stress management, and life skills seem necessary for health coordinating volunteers so that they could learn health life skills, and appropriately transfer to the community. The present study was designed and carried out to determine the effect of health education on the promotion of health coordinating volunteer's knowledge level concerning healthy life styles. In a quasi-experimental study, 112 health coordinating volunteers who collaborated with the Health center of Birjand University of Medical Sciences were assessed. They then attended training courses concerning nutrition, food-stuffs safety, mobility, stress management, and living skills. Pre-designed questionnaires were used to compare and evaluate pre- test and post-knowledge of health coordinating volunteers. Finally, the obtained data was analyzed by means of SPSS software using, paired t-test and Tukey test at P=0.05 as the significant level. Mean knowledge score of health coordinating volunteers revealed that their pre-intervention knowledge of 21.01 increased to 27.88 after intervention. The difference was statistically significant (P<0.01). Comparison between mean knowledge score of health coordinating volunteers before and after intervention showed that continuous instruction of health coordinating volunteers would be effective and thus holding regular training courses for them are essential. Besides, instruction provided by more educated health coordinating volunteers in the community has higher effectiveness on those with a lower level of education. Thus, selecting health volunteers out of educated individuals could be more useful in promoting the community health level.