The effectiveness of health education program on knowledge of diabetes mellitus among public in Puncak Alam / Fatin Syazwani Abdul Malek, Yasmin Che Osman and Zahirah Zolkefli

Background: Diabetes affects millions of people worldwide. Approximately, based on National Diabetic Registration (NDR) by comparing by states, the largest number of patients were registered from Selangor (106,101), followed by Johor (92,750) and Perak (74,492) and the prevalence of diabetes among adults in Malaysia is expected to increase to 21.6% by the year 2020. It is also projected by the World Health Organization (WHO) that DM will be the seventh leading cause of death globally by 2030. Objectives: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the health education regarding the diabetes mellitus. Setting: This study was conducted at Puncak Alam, Selangor. Method: A-quasi experimental study design was carried out whereby 48 participants (n=48) must undergo the health education given and then completed pre and post questionnaires which consist of 14 items multiple choice questions of diabetes knowledge test. The result of test was assessed and categorized into two level of knowledge (poor and good) and analyze using descriptive analysis, pre and post-test was compared using McNemar test and level of knowledge was associated with socio-demographic data (age, gender, education, occupation and salary) using Chi-square test. Results: Knowledge level of participants during pre-test were mostly 83.33% (n=40) had the good knowledge (score > 7) while 16.7% (n=8) had poor knowledge (score < 7). 14.62% (n=7) had improved to good knowledge indicated 97.92% (n=47) score > 7 during post-test. In this study, p=0.001 indicating that there was a statistically significant difference between pre-test and post-test response. There were also an association between level of knowledge and age (p=0.01), education (p=0.01) and salary (p=0.03). However, there is no association between level of knowledge with gender (p=0.15) and occupation (p=0.98) respectively. Conclusion: This study proved that most of public in Puncak Alam have good of knowledge regarding DM. It is also suggested that the intervention of health education program in this study was effective in increasing the level of knowledge of participants. Participants who were in middle age, higher education background and higher monthly income has the higher knowledge level. Therefore, the prevention method such as health education is important to create awareness and understanding about the disease as it can reduce the prevalence of DM.