Effectiveness of A PROCEED-Based Educational Program in Empowering Healthcare Workers to Identify Child Abuse Cases

Objective:

 Child abuse is not a new phenomenon, it exists in different forms in any country and culture. Health care workers in health centers provide health-based services to families from pre-pregnancy to early childhood. Therefore, they should have the ability to identify the occurrence of child abuse. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a PRECEDE-based educational program in empowering health care workers to identify child abuse.

Methods :

This is a quasi-experimental study conducted on 88 health care workers in health centers of Semnan city in Iran in 2017 who were randomly selected. They were divided into intervention (n= 44) and control (n=44) groups. The data collection tools were a demographic form and a researcher-made questionnaire based on the constructs of the PRECEDE model. Educational program was provided in the intervention group at 4 sessions of 60 minutes. Data were collected before and one month after the intervention. The collected data were analyzed in SPSS v. 22 using statistical tests including Fisher’s exact test, independent t-test, ANOVA, and paired t-test.  

Results:

 The mean age of participants was 34±7.81 years. At baseline, there was no significant difference between the two groups. After intervention,  the mean scores of knowledge (P<0.0001), attitude (P<0.0001), enabling factors (P<0.05), and reinforcing factors (P=0.0001) were significantly different between the two groups. The mean pretest score of behavior in the intervention group was 41.41±4.150, which reached 47.34± 2.820 after the educational intervention which was significantly different (P<0.0001), but there was no significant difference between the behavior scores of control group.

Conclusion:

 The education based on PRECEDE model increases predisposing factors (knowledge and attitudes), enabling factors, reinforcing factors, and behavior of health care workers in identifying the cases of child abuse.