A Study to Assess the Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Menstural Hygiene among Adolescent Girls and to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Structured Teaching Programme - A Quasi Experimental Study

The researchers conducted a quasi experimental study to evaluate the effectiveness of the structured teaching programme on menstrual hygiene and to assess the attitude and practice of the menstrual hygiene among adolescent schoolgirls in the selected schools of Varanasi India. The study was conducted among 150 randomly selected adolescent girls of the selected schools in Varanasi India. The levels of knowledge attitude and practice on menstrual hygiene were collected using a validated tool. After organizing and analyzing the data the study shows that 84.66 % had moderately adequate knowledge, 43.33 % of the samples had negative attitude and 24.66 % had poor practice on menstrual hygiene. The researchers evaluated the post test values after a structured teaching programme on menstrual hygiene which showed that the structured teaching programme had an positive impact in improving the knowledge of the adolescent girls about menstrual hygiene (t-value was 4.427 with a p-value of 0.0068 and the result is significant at p<0.5). The study concludes that the concept of understanding the physiology of menstruation and the importance of menstrual hygiene is the need of the hour. Yet this research stands as a proof that menstruating girls and women especially adolescent girls need a lot of education and peer discussion is needed. Though the Indian government has started a lot of newer initiatives like the Peer education programme called Sathiya, in a culturally diverse and ideologically conservative country like India, reach of 100 % menstrual hygiene to all the menstruating girls and women is still being an unmet dream of the health care system in India.