Effectiveness of health exhibitions on knowledge and attitudes toward nutrition and disease prevention in Saudi Arabia: an intervention study.

Although health exhibitions are interactive platforms for large audiences, few studies have evaluated their effectiveness in improving participants' knowledge in Saudi Arabia. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the effect of health exhibitions on public health knowledge and attitudes among adult residents of Unayzah, Saudi Arabia, focusing on the "Vaccine Preventable Disease Awareness Exhibition" and the "Health and Nutrition Exhibition," which took place from January to April 2025. This study employed a one-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design. Data were collected using a self-administered electronic questionnaire from 389 participants at the Vaccine Preventable Disease Awareness Exhibition and 162 participants at the Health and Nutrition Exhibition. We assessed changes in participants' knowledge and attitudes toward nutrition, disease prevention, and vaccination by comparing pre- and post-exhibition assessments. We explored the influence of demographic factors, such as age, sex, and education level, on participants' engagement and knowledge acquisition. As data were non-normally distributed, non-parametric tests were applied: McNemar's test for paired categorical knowledge items, Wilcoxon signed-rank test for attitude scores, and Kruskal-Wallis test with Dunn-Bonferroni post-hoc comparisons for demographic analyses. Participants' knowledge of health and nutrition and their perceptions of vaccines improved after the exhibitions. There were significant differences between pre- and post-assessment knowledge of the E100 food additive symbol (p < 0.001), meal-skipping effects (p < 0.001), and gout-related dietary knowledge (p < 0.001), as well as vaccination knowledge items including cause of plague (p < 0.001) and vaccine-eradicated diseases (p < 0.001). Our findings revealed that both exhibitions enhanced knowledge in the target community, underscoring the role of community health education in improving public awareness. This study provides insight into the short-term effect of interactive exhibitions on public health knowledge and attitudes.