A Study on the Effectiveness of a Health Education Intervention Combining an Online Digital App for HFMD with Offline Health-themed Cultural and Creative Products

Vollständiger Abstract

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Hand-foot-mouth disease (HFMD) is a Class C infectious disease prevalent among infants and toddlers under 5 years old. There are no specific antiviral drugs available for its treatment, making health education a core strategy for prevention and control. To develop a tiered and fully inclusive popular science model for HFMD prevention, this study recruited 318 primary caregivers of young children and 216 kindergarten staff in Wenzhou as research subjects. A self-designed questionnaire covering HFMD awareness and health behaviors was compiled, and two types of publicity carriers—an immersive virtual simulation education APP and daily-use health cultural and creative products—were developed for a 3-month combined intervention. Paired t-tests, chi-square tests and binary logistic regression were adopted to analyze intervention effects. The results indicated that after intervention, the awareness rate of HFMD knowledge among both groups and the compliance rate of healthy behaviors among family caregivers increased significantly (P < 0.05). Both the APP and health cultural and creative products acted as independent positive protective factors for improving disease prevention awareness. The online APP suits young and middle-aged populations, while offline cultural and creative products can reach elderly caregivers with low digital literacy; the integration of the two eliminates coverage gaps in health education. This study verifies that the integrated publicity model combining digital online tools and daily cultural and creative products can effectively improve the infectious disease health literacy of populations related to preschool childcare, and provides practical solutions for routine health education in communities and kindergartens.