Effect of Educational Intervention Based on Health Belief Model to Promote Cardiovascular Disease Preventive Behaviors

Cardiovascular diseases are among the leading causes of mortality worldwide. Given the importance of education in promoting behaviors to prevent cardiovascular diseases, this study aims to investigate the effect of training intervention based on the health belief model on the diseases preventive behaviors in health workers of Rafsanjan.

This semi-experimental study was conducted on 79 health workers of Rafsanjan city in 2019. The samples were selected purposively and divided into intervention and control groups randomly. Specific questionnaires of demographic information and health belief model were completed in two sessions before and after the intervention. For the intervention group, four 45-minute training sessions were provided, while no training intervention was implemented for the control group. The collected data were analyzed using independent t-test, fisher's exact test, and chi-square (χ2) tests of the SPSS Version 18 software at a significance level of 0.05.

The results showed that the mean scores of awareness (p>0.004), perceived sensitivity (p>0.001), perceived severity (p=0.002), perceived benefits (p>0.001), self-efficiency (p>0.001), and preventive behaviors from cardiovascular diseases (p>0.001) increased significantly in the intervention group compared to the control group.

This study showed that health belief model-based training could effectively improve the preventive behaviors from cardiovascular diseases.