Teaching Hand Washing Techniques in a Community Using Innovative Teaching-Learning Methods

Abstract

Background: Personal hygiene is of paramount importance in the prevention and spread of communicable diseases like diarrheal diseases, Typhoid, Cholera & Hepatitis. Though awareness programs are carried out through various media, it is doubtful how many of them are equipped with the proper techniques of washing hands in the real life situations. Our first year medical students are taught the essentiality of effective communication skills and the importance of hand hygiene. Through this project we teach hand washing to a community through demonstration, an innovative teaching-learning method. Objective: (1) To measure the level of knowledge about the importance and the proper methods of hand washing in a selected community of the same socio-economic status. (2) To quantify the effectiveness of this teaching-learning experience using a pre test and post test containing pre validated specific checklists.Materials and Methods: 64 first year medical students recruited after obtaining written informed consent, were trained using power point and demonstration. After dividing into 32 teams to visit 64 houses, where the first student demonstrated and the second one silently observed and filled the pre-validated checklists. Result: The scores of pre and post tests tabulated in excel and analyzed using Paired t-test showed statistical significance (2- tailed p-value < 0.001) which indicates that the effect of training through demonstration was significant. Conclusion: Through this project we could prove that demonstration is an effective and innovative learning method which can be incorporated more into our medical education.