Educational empowerment of health volunteers by using educational-participatory methods

Introduction: Health volunteers can play an important role in empowering the community, especially women, due to their continuous relationships with their families and their cultural, economic, and social similarity. Volunteer’s participation in education will raise community health awareness in various fields, thereby improving the performance of individuals. Proper training for health volunteers is important. The use of collaborative and participatory approaches is increasing day by day, one of which is the role playing technique. Due to the positive impact of education on the basis of different educational methods. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of education based role playing on health empowerment of health volunteers in selected Shiraz health centers.Methods: In this quasi-experimental study conducted in 2017, all volunteers from two comprehensive health centers in Shiraz were randomly selected to participate in the study. At first, the pre-test for the book Promoting Breastfeeding was completed by the volunteers. Then, based on the results of the pre-test in three sessions, the educational materials were taught by the volunteers through the role play method. At the end of training and two months after training, they were re-evaluated. The volunteers satisfaction with the different dimensions of this educational intervention was also examined Findings: The results of the study showed that after training with role playing method, the average knowledge of volunteers immediately and two months after the intervention increased. This shows the effectiveness of education by role play (P <0.001). The average score of volunteers satisfaction of active teaching methods and their participation was increased 37% (58/19 ± 6).Conclusion: The positive effect of using the role play method on volunteering education empowerment shows that more dynamic and effective methods such as role play, by increasing the active participation of learners in the educational process, increase the educational efficiency, sustaining the effects of education on knowledge and knowledge of volunteers. Role play -based learning can be used as an effective way to train health volunteers

Keywords:

health volunteers , Educational empowerment , Role playing