Lim Shermane Y W, Loh Ryan J, Teo Yao Hao, Chong Elliot Y, Tan Zhong Chen, Du Sherry D X, Lee Abigail K, Ren Yi Ping, Chia Joshua, Teo Desmond B, Lim Fong Seng
Department of Medicine, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Department of Social Science, New York University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
J Educ Health Promot. 2024 Aug 29;13:306. doi: 10.4103/jehp.jehp_1245_23. eCollection 2024.
The Youth Health Ambassador Programme (YHAP) is a health educational program aimed at empowering youths to become health ambassadors in the community through raising their health awareness and training them in primary health prevention. This study evaluates the effectiveness of YHAP in improving the knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) of participants in physical and mental health.
This study followed a single-group quasi-experimental design, with a pre- and postworkshop KAP survey. Participants were junior college (JC) and polytechnic students in Singapore enrolled in YHAP. In total, 131 responses were analyzed for changes in KAP for physical and mental health before and after the program. This article also studied the participants' barriers to educating others, including environment factors, intrinsic factors, and receptiveness of the target audience.
Mean scores of all six KAP domains increased from the preworkshop survey to the postworkshop survey, with significant improvements ( < 0.05) in all domains except mental health knowledge. Individually, 16 out of 29 questions in the KAP sections had a significant increment in mean score after the program ( < 0.05). Mean scores for intrinsic barriers also decreased significantly ( < 0.001) postintervention, indicating that participants were less likely to agree that intrinsic factors were a barrier to educating people around them about health postintervention.
YHAP is effective in improving the KAP of physical health and the attitudes and practices of mental health JC and polytechnic students and may reduce the effect of intrinsic barriers that participants face when teaching others.
青年健康大使计划（YHAP）是一项健康教育计划，旨在通过提高青少年的健康意识并对其进行初级健康预防培训，使其成为社区中的健康大使。本研究评估了青年健康大使计划在改善参与者身心健康的知识、态度和行为（KAP）方面的有效性。
本研究采用单组准实验设计，在工作坊前后进行KAP调查。参与者为新加坡参加青年健康大使计划的大专（JC）和理工学院学生。总共分析了131份关于计划前后身心健康KAP变化的回复。本文还研究了参与者在教育他人方面的障碍，包括环境因素、内在因素以及目标受众的接受程度。
从工作坊前的调查到工作坊后的调查，所有六个KAP领域的平均得分均有所提高，除心理健康知识外，所有领域均有显著改善（<0.05）。单独来看，KAP部分的29个问题中有16个在计划实施后平均得分有显著提高（<0.05）。干预后，内在障碍的平均得分也显著降低（<0.001），这表明参与者在干预后不太可能认同内在因素是向周围人传授健康知识的障碍。
青年健康大使计划在改善大专和理工学院学生的身体健康KAP以及心理健康态度和行为方面是有效的，并且可能会减少参与者在教导他人时所面临的内在障碍的影响。
