The Effectiveness of Providing First Aid Interventional Educational Program Designed with Participating Learning Processes in Primary School Teachers

Introduction: The childhood accidents and injuries are a major problem in modern society. Many of these accidents occur in the school environment. Prevention and care are the main goals of teachers in the process of growing and wellbeing of students. Aim: The purpose of this study is to learn basic knowledge and skills of first aid as well as to acquire skills that will contribute to changing the behavior and attitude of teachers when they need to manage emergencies situations about children’s health. Material and Method: This is a quantitative randomized controlled study, the population of which consisted of 908 teachers, 458 of which (50.4%) constitute the educational intervention team and the remaining 450 (49.6%) are the control group. The educational learning method which used is designed with active participatory learning processes. For the data collection, that took place from September 2015 to May 2016, a questionnaire of demographic characteristics and assessment of first aid knowledge was used, at the beginning and at the end of the school year. Statistical analyses were performed using SPSS 22.0 Statistics. Regarding to the repeated measurements, the scatter analysis for repeated measurements (repeated measurements ANOVA) was used to check if there are differences in the measurements both between the groups and in time. Still, no post hoc tests were performed because there were only two groups and only two measurements in the study. Results: The statistical analysis showed a statistically significant difference between the 2 groups (Pearson’s x2 test <0.001‡). Prior to the intervention the scores were similar in both groups, however after the intervention the score was significantly higher in the intervention group, indicating more correct answers to most questions, compared to the control group (Kruskal-Wallis one way ANOVA p<0.001). Conclusions: Intervention programs designed with participatory learning processes increase the level of knowledge of teachers in first aid.