Abstract:
Background: - Breast self-examination (BSE) is a visual and manual examination of a woman's breast by herself, that helps women can detect 95% of breast cancers and 65% of early minimal breast cancers by themselves. The estimated reduction of mortality by breast self-examination was 18% and may increase particularly for competent women. However, there were rare studies on the magnitude of breast-self examination knowledge and effect of health education intervention on the knowledge of BSE among high school female students.
Objective: - To assess the effect of health education intervention on the knowledge of breast self-examination among female high school students in Elu Gelan District, Oromia, West Ethiopia,2023.
Methods: A One group Pretest- posttest study design was conducted among female high school students in Elu Gelan District that enrolled in 2022/23 academic year from April to June 2023. A simple random sampling technique was used to select 344 respondents. Self administered questionnaire was used to collect data two times. Data were entered into Epi-data and then exported to SPSS version 26 for analysis. Descriptive statistics were used to show magnitude of Knowledge of Breast self Examination.
McNemar’s test has been used to see the change of Breast self Examination knowledge during pre and post intervention. Statistical significance was declared at a p-value of <0.05.
Result – A total of 344 female high school students participated in the study, yielding a response rate of 100%. The mean age of the students was 18.55 (2.72 SD), with a minimum of 15 and a maximum of 33 years. The result reveals that 5.5% of the participants with knowledge of BSE are hiking up to 96.2% after the intervention program while 94.5 % of participants with poor knowledge of BSE were decreasing to 3.8%.
The McNemar test shows that the change of BSE knowledge after the intervention is statistically significant (p < 0.001).
Conclusion. The educational intervention program was found to be an effective method to improve the knowledge on Breast Self-Examination among secondary school girls. There fore, every young woman should be empowered the knowledge of breast self-examination through regular, sustained health education intervention in their schools and work places
