Health education aspects of sanitation programmes in rural areas and small communities.

In large population centres, the sanitarian can effect the environmental changes needed without necessarily gaining the widespread participation or understanding of the people who are to benefit. In villages and rural areas, however, this is not so, since the people themselves will have to perform many of the actions needed to break the chain of transmission of disease. The sanitarian, to be successful, must therefore apply the sciences of human behaviour in any attempt to carry out environmental improvements.Before any educational programme for environmental sanitation can be planned, it is necessary to obtain the essential facts about the people of the community. It is, for instance, necessary to find out what health problems they recognize and are interested in, how much they already know, what the usual channels of communication are, what social, cultural, and other influences are operating, and what are the existing resources that could contribute to the programme. In the actual planning, the sanitarian must consider how to get the participation of the people, what decisions can be left to the people themselves, what informational materials are likely to be needed and how they are to be used, and what the criteria of progress are to be.If all these questions are satisfactorily answered, the sanitarian can assist the people to accept responsibility for their own improvement.