بهاره کبیری

Objective (s):

 Considering the role of self-care in reducing the burden of non-communicable diseases and in order to properly increase the importance of health to society, paying attention to the self-care is a priority. This study was conducted with the aim of investigating the effect of an educational intervention in the context of social messengers on the awareness of the health workers regarding the self-care program.

This semi-experimental study was conducted on 705 employees (doctors, nurses, midwives, health care workers) of health centers in Ilam province, Iran during 2020 and 2021. To collect data, a self-designed questionnaire containing 330 questions related to the 22 educational packages of the national self-care program provided by the Ministry of Health was used. The questionnaire was completed before an educational intervention and 9-months follow-up. The data was analyzed with SPSS version 24 software and through paired t-test and chi-square test.

The results indicated a significant increase in the awareness of health workers in the field of self-care program during a period of nine months after the educational intervention using the virtual educational method. A statistically significant relationship was observed between increasing the level of awareness of health workers with variables such as age (0.01), education level (0.05), gender (0.01) and organizational position (0.01).

Considering the important and fundamental role of health workers in improving the level of health literacy of the society and on the other hand the growing trend of access to social messengers, it is suggested with a cascade approach and based on social accountability, suitable educational programs to improve the awareness of health workers and subsequently health ambassadors at the household level should be prioritized.