| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 醫療機構管理研究所 === 92 === In July 1999, the Republic of China’s Department of Health, Executive Yuan, launched the “Health Promoting Community” Program. The Program hopes that by involving its residents and resources, the locals are able to identify health issues in their community, and reach consensus on how to address these issues as well as developing a community-based self managing health building mechanism.
The success of the program depends on a number of factors and key among them is the effectiveness of the health promotion volunteers. As the volunteers play a vital role in the community health building structure, the issue of how best to assess their performance has become of great importance.
The key objective of this study is to conduct a preliminary evaluation of the performance of the health promotion volunteers at the community health building centers of the Hualien County, Taiwan. Health promotion volunteers registered with the Health Bureau of Hualien County Government were involved in this study. They were interviewed by means of telephone. Of the 290 volunteers interviewed, a total of 214 answered all the questions posed to them, hence, a response rate of 73.8%. Descriptive statistics analysis, Chi-Square test, regression analysis and logistic analysis were used for the statistical analysis.
The study found that the bulk of the health promotion volunteers were female （92.1%）, homemaker（49.1%）, Buddhist（49.1%）, age between 41-60 years （68.9%）, middle school education level（40.2%）, monthly household income of NT$20,001-NT$40,000（34.6%）. The local administrative agencies （39.7%） ranked highest among the volunteers in terms of disseminating recruitment information. There was a positive correlation between ‘years of service’ and ‘no of persons the volunteers would recommend to join the service’. The volunteers averaged 7.5 hours per month of volunteering time, and serving 48 persons per month. The types of activities involved by the volunteers were mainly related to the ‘common services’（39.4%）and ‘administrative work’（34.2%） of the community health building center. Only 2.1% and 20.8% of the volunteers were involved in the ‘home care service’ and ‘home visit’, respectively. On the level of satisfaction, 79.3% of the volunteers gave a score of ‘8 points and above’（Very Satisfied）for the overall performance of the community health building center and 75.7% gave the same score range for the performance of their fellow volunteers. As for their own performance, only 46.0% of the volunteers rated them ‘8 and above’. The overall average score was 7.08 points. The level of personal satisfaction and number of hours volunteered were found to be positively correlated. Moreover, positive correlations were also observed between level of satisfaction of the community health building center and the age group of the volunteers as well as the average hours spent on volunteering. On the change of health habits before and after joining the volunteer service, it was found that majority of the volunteers（~90%）already adopted good health habits before joining. Of the minority with bad health habits, most had indicated that they had started moving away from the old habits and changed for the better. On counseling and encouraging others to move away from undesired health habits, the effort put on alcoholism problem was the lowest（73.8%）. In the area of health issues faced by the community, 81.8% of the volunteers expressed that they understood the problems. However, they were not able to correctly pinpoint the health issues specifically.
The findings in this study could serve as the baseline of all future studies on assessing the performance of health promotion volunteers of the community health building centers. This study also concluded that the community health building centers must diversify their services and activities to meet the needs of different age groups so as to achieve the target of participation of all citizens and ‘Health-for-All’.
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