Mixed method evaluation of a clinic waiting room–based health education program in the Dominican Republic

Abstract

Waiting rooms provide an ideal location to disseminate health information. In this mixed-methods study, we evaluated waiting room–based health education talks at two clinics in the Dominican Republic and explored recommendations for implementing this intervention in similar settings. The talks addressed noncommunicable diseases, sexually transmitted infections, family planning and gender-based violence. We conducted pre- and posttests to assess attendees’ change in knowledge and conducted semi-structured interviews with a subset of them. We conducted a semi-structured focus group with educators. Analyses included Wilcox Signed Rank Tests and McNemar tests for pre- and posttests, conventional content analysis for individual interviews and transcript coding for the focus group. Patient participants were 69.3% female aged 39.6 years (SD = 13.5) on average at one clinic (n = 127) and 100% female aged 17.4 (SD = 1.3) on average at the second clinic (n = 24). Focus group participants (n = 5) had 4.8 years (SD = 3.3) of health educator experience on average. Pre- and posttests showed significant improvement (P < 0.05) across all talks. Qualitative interviews emphasized engaging, clear and brief content delivery with visual aids. The focus group highlighted the importance of patient-centered design with culturally concordant delivery and identified implementation challenges. Findings demonstrate that waiting room–based education talks improve knowledge and provide suggestions for similar interventions.