As a part of the supervised field training of the students of health education from Rural Health Training Centre, Gandhigram, Tamil Nadu, a pilot project of short term intensive health education was undertaken at 11 selected villages under Primary Health Centre (PHC), Hesarghatta. The objectives were to measure the impact of an intensive health education effort in increasing the attendance of patients with symptoms suggestive of pulmonary tuberculosis at a PHC and to study the impact of health education in terms of increase in knowledge and change of attitude of the people towards the PHC. For participation of the community all the three health education approaches viz., individual approach, group approach and mass approach were planned along with audio visual aids as and when required. Application of a specific approach depended on the level of awareness about tuberculosis and the availability of services which was measured by a base line survey conducted in the selected villages.

As expected this short term intensive health education has shown that the knowledge on tuberculosis in the population increased, following it. When it was measured by the yardstick of increase in the proportion of out patients with chest symptoms, attending the PHC, no significant change was noticed during the period of observation. The likely reason could be that it was too early to measure the effect of health education within a period of 6 weeks. In this project the intensive health education work was done almost continuously for a short time which was probably not appreciated by the people. Though in all the villages following the health education programme, the people had understood the importance of getting the chest symptoms examined to rule out tuberculosis, they have not approached the PHC for the same. The other possible reason could be that the people are not satisfied with the services provided by the PHC. It goes without saying that when the services provided by the PHC itself are not upto the expectation of the people, the outcome of health education could only be