PERCEIVED PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY IMPACT ON HEALTH PROMOTION OF HOUSEHOLD RESIDENTS IN BAUCHI STATE, NIGERIA

Public health policies are laws, regulations and decisions that are made and implemented by public health authorities for disease prevention and health promotion. In Bauchi State there are policies on pre-marital screening of HIV/AIDs, Hepatitis, Genotype, pre-marital Pregnancy Test and free Distribution of insecticide nets, therefore, this study investigated the perceived impact of these policies on health promotion of household residents in Bauchi State. Ex-post factor research design was used to conduct this study, the population of the study comprised all households residing in Bauchi State with a population of 5,321,22, the sample for the study were 479 selected through multi-stage sampling procedure of cluster sampling, simple random sampling and systematic sampling techniques. The instrument used for data collection was a researcherdeveloped questionnaire on four four-point modified Likert scale, the instrument was validated and its reliability was ascertained where a reliability index of .71 was obtained which indicates that the instrument was reliable. Multivariate Analysis and Analysis of Variance were used to analyse the data collected from the respondents. The results revealed that public health policies of pre-marital screening of HIV/AIDs (p-000), Genotype (p-000), Pregnancy (p-000), Hepatitis(p000), and free distribution of ITNs (p-000), were significantly perceived to have an impact on the health promotion of households residing in Bauchi State. Therefore, the study concluded that public health policies regulations and laews were found to have impact on the health promotion of household residents in Bauchi State. It was recommended that strict measures should be put in place to ensure adherence to the pre-marital screening laws and policies in the State and also annual distribution of ITNs should be maintained by the government as they have impact on public health promotion.