This study investigated the effects of health education on knowledge and practices among Sawmill workers in Port Harcourt Rivers State Nigeria. sixteen sawmills located within four communities in Port Harcourt (mile1, mile 2, mile 3 and mile 4) in Rivers State was used. Purposive sampling was adopted for selection of the 4 sawmills locations, while systematic and simple random sampling was used to select 16 sawmill sites and 235 questionnaires were found to have been properly filled, giving a response rate of 94%. A self structured questionnaire titled knowledge and practices of sawmill workers questionnaires (KPSWQ) was used for data collection. Cronbach’s alpha statistics was used to determine a reliability index of 0.79. Mean, percentage and standard deviation was used answer the research questions. The hypotheses were tested at 0.05 alpha levels using z-test, Likert’s Scale and Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA). The sociodemographic result revealed male accounting for (80.8%). Over half (62.9%) of respondents were age 26-35years, 42.5% had 9hours and above exposure and 43.4% were married, a notable percentage (54.4%) of sawmill workers had secondary and tertiary qualifications and relatively short experience in sawmill workers with over half (44.3%) having worked for 10 years or less. The findings on knowledge revealed that the control group pretest and post-test knowledge were 56.4% and 58.2% respectively while that of treatment pretest and post-test were 37.5% and 71.3% respectively. The percentage difference of control group pretest and post-test was 1.8% while that of treatment group was 33.8%. This showed that the treatment group gained 32% increase in knowledge of sawmill workers after the intervention. The practices result showed that the control group pretest mean sore was 2.69±0.998 while the post-test mean score was 2.72±1.081, the treatment group pretest mean score was 2.61±1.059 while the post-test mean score was 3.10±1.152. The pretest and post-test mean difference for control group was 0.03 while that of treatment group was 0.49. This implies that the treatment group practice was improved by the health education. It was concluded that safety training was possible among Nigerian sawmills workers and should be incorporated in Nigerian state sawmills in line with best practices as recommended by the Green World group NEBOSH.
Keywords: Health Education Intervention, Knowledge, Practices, sawmills workers and safety
