Effective analysis of a community-based intervention during heat waves to improve knowledge, attitude and practice in a population in Licheng District, Jinan City, China

Background: Intervention strategies that focus on coping with continuous heat wave threats have been implemented in many countries. Despite these efforts, we still lack evidence concerning intervention efficacy. A Heat Wave Intervention Program (HWIP) that impacts knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) was designed, and its effectiveness during heat waves was evaluated. Methods: A stratified two-stage probability proportion to size sampling method was employed to analyze an intervention group and a control group. Two cross-sectional surveys, which included questions about heat waves in 2014 and 2015, were analyzed using difference-in-difference (DID) analysis. Results: Mean KAP scores among participants with different demographic characteristics in the intervention group were higher in 2015 than those in 2014. Further analysis by DID found that implementing interventions was positively associated with knowledge (s = 0.387, P < 0.001) and attitude (s = 0.166, P < 0.01). Conclusion: Intervention measures can significantly promote levels of knowledge and attitude. However, as the practice level, most of the sub-groups showed no significant differences for net values between in the intervention group and control group. A cost-benefit analysis was suggested as future work to check the effectiveness of the program. Therefore, further improvement measures should be targeted towards the populations to enable them to effectively cope with the heat waves.