Effectiveness of instructional teaching package on knowledge regarding first aid and safety measures among school children

Abstract

: Henry Sigerist, the medical historian, stated that “the people’s health ought to be the concern of the people themselves. They must struggle for it and plan for it. The war against disease and for health cannot be fought by physicians alone. It is the people’s war in which the entire population must be mobilized permanently.This school-based interventional study was conducted in Radharani Siksha Mandir High School located in Paltagarh, Singur Block of Hooghly district, West Bengal, among students of Class VI and Class VII on February–March. The middle school students were chosen keeping in view of their mid-adolescent age that makes them prone to injuries and accidents. All students of 6th standard and 7th standard were eligible to participate. Although educational intervention was imparted to all those present on the day of intervention, post intervention knowledge was assessed among only those students whose pre interventional knowledge score was available. Out of 230 students, 60% of the students belonged to Class VII and the rest in Class VI and half of them who participated in the study were girls (53.5%). The mean age of the study participants was 12.5 ± 0.73 years. Background data revealed that majority of their parents were educated up to tenth standard (48.7% fathers and 37.8% of mothers); father of 25.2% were farmers, 24.7% were daily laborers, 18.6% were doing business, 26.5% of them were skilled laborers, and 5.0% of them were in service while mothers of all students were homemakers. All of the students had heard of the term “first aid” and out of them, only 14 of them (6 girls and 8 boys) had reported any past practical experience of administering first aid. Among those who had heard about first aid, TV/radio was the major source of information (38.7%), followed by parents (24.3%), teachers (17.4%), friends (11.7%), and relatives (4.8%). 36.5% of the students answered that there was a chapter on first aid in their science book while the rest either denied (54.3%) or could not even remember (9.2%) any such chapter. However, all of them unanimously agreed that it was not taught as a part of their syllabus. The present study revealed that all the students had heard of the name of first aid which were similar to the findings of Priyangika and Hettiarachhi in a study conducted in Sri Lanka while Dasgupta et al. reported in her study that merely (15.2%) of the study subjects knew about the correct definition of the term first aid.”