The Effectiveness of Health Education in the Waiting Room of Pensioners Bank in Improving Elderly Health Perspective, Behavior and Morbidity

Elderly need intensive exposure to health education to recognize and prevent diseases, like a degenerativeand infectious disease. Any chance when elderly gather and spend significant time, like 30-60 minutes of waitingtime for withdrawing pension money in the bank can be utilized as an opportunity to deliver health educationmessage. This initiated collaboration among pension bank and general practitioners to perform specific healtheducation program to elderly in their waiting room. This study investigates how health education and consultationprogram in the pension bank would be useful to change elderly health perspective, behavior, and morbidity. Across-sectional comparative study was conducted to 438 elderlies in 10 cities of 14 pension bank branchesin Indonesia in 2014-2015. We divided them into two groups: health education participants (n=345) and nonparticipants(n=93) to compare their health perspective, behavior, and morbidity after six months of educationexposure. Elderly perspective on healthy lifestyle was elicited using a set of 11 questions that were graded on aLikert scale of 1-5 where onePKPCleaned= less important to 5 = most important. We also recalled whether they conductedactive lifestyle and had a history of illness in the last three months. Participants group had a significant increasein health perspectives, especially about the importance of regular health checking and maintaining a healthy diet(p<0.05). They also had fewer case of chronic illnesses (p=0.01, OR 0.51 IK95% 0.30-0.89). Their active lifestylewas also increased but not significant (p=0.164). Health education in the waiting room of pension bank wasproven effective to improve health perspective and decrease long term illnesses in the elderly. With standardizededucation module and cooperation with the trained health educator, this approach of optimizing queuing time inthe waiting room of pension bank can be applied to intensify access to health education for elderly.