Background: Hand-foot-mouth disease (HFMD) is an infectious disease that mainly occurs in children under five years old. Vietnam is a developing country with high prevalence of the disease outbreak every year. Can Tho City, Co Do District had the highest incidence of children under five years old acquired HFMD.

Objective: 1) To determine the factors correlating with knowledge, attitude, and practice in HFMD prevention of mothers having children under five years old, and 2) to evaluate the alteration in knowledge, attitude, and practice in prevention HFMD of mothers having children under five years old after intervention with health educational communication.

Materials and Methods: Community intervention study was done in 420 subjects. At first, all the participants would do the questionnaire and practicing assessment. Then, the participants were divided into two groups, the intervened group for educational communication, and the control group with no intervention. The intervention included three steps, 1) training knowledge and skills for medical staffs and collaborators, 2) providing information about HFMD for the mothers, 3) broadcasting information leaflets to the subjects’ house every month. The assessment in awareness, attitude, and practice would be performed again after one month. The present study staff achieved approval from the Science and Educating Council of Can Tho University of Medicine and Pharmacy. In addition, the present study also received the agreement from The People’s Committee of Co Do District.

Results: The present study results shows that 23.3% of mothers had the right knowledge, 50.5% of mothers had the right attitude, and 17.4% of mothers with children under five years of age had the right disease prevention practice. There was an association between education level of mothers with children under five years of age with knowledge, attitude, and practice in disease prevention. After intervention, knowledge of the mothers in the intervened group improved more than 2.79 times, right attitude more than 2.84 times, and practice improvement more than 1.83 times in compared with the control group.

Conclusion: Educational communication plays an important role in HFMD disease prevention through increasing the awareness, opinion, and disease prevention of the mothers who directly take care of the under five years old children.

Keywords: Hand-foot-mouth disease; Knowledge; Attitudes; Practices; Effective intervention

DOI: doi.org/10.35755/jmedassocthai.2021.08.10816

Received 18 November 2019 | Revised 7 June 2021 | Accepted 29 June 2021