The effect of health education on the knowledge, attitude, and uptake of free Pap smear among female teachers in Birnin-Kebbi, North-Western Nigeria

Abstract

Health education had no significant effect on the uptake of a free Pap smear among teachers. Despite the significant improvement in the attitude toward the test, many respondents did not like the test after than before the intervention. Sociocultural issues such as the gender of the sample collector, and system factors like few service delivery points, and the time required to access the service could have contributed to the poor uptake recorded in this study. A program designed to improve routine cervical cancer screening by Pap smear should therefore address not only the knowledge and cost, but also the sociocultural and systemic factors.

Disseminating Cervical Cancer Knowledge: Impact of a Public Seminar

“…Since the post-test was done immediately after the intervention, it could be assumed that the improvement in these variables was probably due to the health education intervention through scientific lectures during seminar that were delivered. These results were consistent with other scholars' finding (Adamu et al, 2012;Dim et al, 2009;Hou et al, 2004;Papa et al, 2009) who found the efficacy of such educational programs. Accordingly same effectiveness was proved not only for disseminating cancer screening information but also for other health messages such as health hazard of cigarette smoking (Salaudeen et al, 2011;Lee and Wang, 2002), health education for family planning (Mahamed et al, 2012) and so on.…”

Interventions to increase uptake of cervical screening in sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review using the integrated behavioral model

“…The systematic search returned 3704 unique entries, after duplicates were removed. Screening and application of eligibility criteria produced 19 studies for inclusion in the review [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33]. Figure 2 shows the results of the study selection process.…”

“…Minimum age eligibility criteria were used to define target populations; few studies cited World Health Organization or other screening recommendations when defining age criteria. Pap smear or cytology-based cervical screening was assessed most often (n = 6, 31.6%) [16,17,21,26,31,33]. A quarter of studies (n = 5, 26.3%) did not specify which screening test was being performed [20,22,24,29,32].…”

“…One study created a screening score that accounted for presence of screening behavior, as well as when screening was last received and whether or not a woman was upto-date with screening recommendations [19]. Some studies used vague language to describe uptake of cervical screening, which made it impossible to clearly deduce the measure of screening [16,22,28,29,32]. At baseline, screening coverage ranged from 0 to 53.6%, with most studies reporting coverage of less than 10% (n = 12, 63.2%).…”

“…Following intervention, coverage ranged from 1.7 to 99.2%, with six studies reporting a significant improvement in screening that achieved ≥60% coverage (31.6%). More than a third of the studies reported non-significant increases in screening uptake associated with their intervention (n = 7, 36.8%); all of them were educational interventions [16,17,21,29,[31][32][33].…”