Factors associated with self-efficacy on health promotion education practice among Korean public health doctors

Abstract

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle has been known as the most important key factor among genetic, environmental, medical service factors for individuals' health. To assist healthy lifestyle among patients, doctors can certainly influence patients through health promotion education; however, they don't provide such valuable services in reality. Many researchers mentioned that one of the reasons might be due to the lack of self-efficacy in providing health promotion education. The purpose of the study was to explore the factors associated with the self-efficacy for doctors not providing the health promotion education. The data were from 921 Korean public health doctors in 2007. A questionnaire was provided to collect data on previous counseling training, previous counseling experiences, medical career level, and specialty. The previous counseling experience on health promotion were varied depending on the previous training and specialty. Doctors with the higher scores on the responsibility(subjective norm) for health promotion education practice, with higher scores of knowledge on each health topic (i.e. smoking; drinking, exercise, and diet), and with previous counseling experience provided more health promotions education counseling. In specific, internists with higher scores on health topics were more likely to have previous counseling experiences and more likely to provide such services. Also, internists answered health promotion education for patients as their responsibility. To find out the factors associated with self-efficacy, multiple regression analysis was conducted. The results showed that the higher scores in the previous training experiences, the counseling experiences, responsibility(subjective norm) and knowledge level, the higher self-efficacy. Among these factors, knowledge was associated with self-efficacy the most. The study suggested that health promotion education at medical school and at hospital should be emphasized in a training or education program to improve knowledge level associated with self-efficacy.