Trends in health-related behaviors of Korean adults: study based on data from the 2008-2014 Community Health Surveys / 한국역학회지

Unhealthy lifestyle behaviors such as smoking, alcohol consumption, and physical inactivity (multiple risks) often lead to serious health consequence and impaired health status. The purpose of this study was to investigate the trend in health-related behavioral factors over time among adults in South Korea (hereafter Korea). The data of 1,595,842 Koreans older than 19 years who participated in the 2008-2014 Korea Community Health Survey were analyzed to assess the trend in the prevalence of behavioral risk factors. Individual or clustering health-related behaviors were assessed according to sex, age, and region among 228,712 adults who participated in the 2014 survey. From 2008 to 2014, the age-adjusted prevalence of obesity and high-risk alcohol use increased the prevalence of male current smoking and marginally decreased walking ability. Over 7 years, the percentage of adults who reported having all three healthy behaviors (i.e., currently not smoking, not consuming alcohol or having high-risk alcohol use, and engaging in walking) decreased from 35.2% in 2008 to 29.6% in 2014. Increased efforts to emphasize multiple health-related behavioral risk factors, including reducing alcohol use and smoking, and to encourage walking are needed in the thirties and forties age groups in Korea.

Web-Based Instruction For Public Health Officials-A Prototype Development And Preliminary Evaluation / 대한의료정보학회지

Health and Welfare Training Center of Korean National Institute of Health (KNIH) has developed various education curricula for the officials who involved in the public health or welfare sectors. Still almost all education programs are off-line based. In off-line settings, both the lecturers and the students should come to KNIH from their counties to join the education programs, and it is impossible for the students to review or to re-practice the education contents. From September to October, 2000, we conducted a basic survey to evaluate the information infrastructure, internet use and attitude to the cyber education. The 183 institutions and 548 public health officials answered our questionnaire. The informationa infrastructure of each institution was not satisfactory for distance education via world wide web. The proportion of e-mail user was only about 62% of the answered subjects. But cyber- education was highly needed in both institutions and the surveyed officials. They answered that they would actively participate in the cyber-education(97%). The officials expected that the online education would be effective to acquire information, to increase the chance for participation and to reduce the education cost. The expected barriers of the cyber-education were the overload when they should undergo simultaneously education and working, lack of proper infrastructure, disinterest of their low capability of internet use.

Web-Based Instruction For Public Health Officials-A Prototype Development And Preliminary Evaluation / 대한의료정보학회지

We developed a prototype of web-based instruction(WBI) program to provide more convenient and more effective service to the public health officials. This web-based instruction program had specific objectives on vaccination for the public health officials who were working for national immunization program. This course had 21 chapters composed of hypertext or voice-based instruction. Using the WBI courseware of Korean Officials Trainging Institution(KOTI), 32 public health official volunteers joined this prototype 2 week program in April 2001. A Auestionnaire survey for evaluation of subjective satisfaction and related factors, cyber-education behavior, and internet using behavior was performed in April, 2001. Among the answered 29 subjects, 24 were female(82.8%). Mean age was 36.6% 6.16. 79.3% of the 29 subjects connected internet in their office. The highest frequent study duration was < 1 hr(51.7%) per connection. They represented relatively high subjective satisfaction in education form(78.6%), and contents(85.7%). But 62.3% of these subjects answered the subjective relative effectiveness score(which was as 100 in case of classical lecture form) was lower than 100. The place to connect internet was only statistically significant factor between these two groups in bivariable analysis. But we could not found any significant factors in multivariate analysis. 89.7% of the subjects answered they would like to participate any more WBI courses serviced by Korean National Health Institute. This study had restriction of small sample size.