Project News

The training package of MCH RB, Nutrition Counseling Services and Respectful Care consists of operational guidelines, user guide, trainer's guide, participant guide and training curriculum. GHS and the Project developed the package in 2019 and GHS declared them as a standard for the national rollout and encouraging all regions, districts and the partners to use it in their programs. While the package was utilized at several training conducted by GHS with the Project or other partners such as World Bank in various regions, there were needs for the revision to support better understanding among health workers on the contents.

GHS counterparts and the Project experts worked on the first major revision of the training package through the on-line meetings under the COVID-19 response. The technical team consisted of Reproductive and Child Health and Nutrition officers of GHS Family Health Division and the project Japanese experts held the first meeting to start the revision of the materials in March 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all Japanese project experts had to temporally evacuate from Ghana by April 2020. In a difficult situation, however, the GHS officers and the Japanese experts had weekly online meetings and continued working on the revision of the training package.

Modification of Training Program

The team modified the duration of the training program from 3 days to 4 days to allocate more time to practice and to cover the new contents. The table below compares modules before and after the revision.

Main revisions to the training materials

One new content "How to use Child Health and Nutrition Register" was added in Module 4. GHS replaced the old Child register with the new Nutrition and Child Health register to health institutions recently. The new register included an additional registration section on the nutrition status of a child and other sections linked to MCHRB and the project indicators. Another content "Investigating causes of malnutrition" was also newly added in Module 5. It aimed to strengthen a knowledge basis among health workers to conduct effective nutrition counseling sessions. Food Calendar was also introduced in the same module to equip health workers with the knowledge on nutrition-rich foods that were available in the local area in various seasons. In addition, Module 5 was modified to focus on knowledge and techniques for nutrition counseling, while module 8 teaches how to operationalize nutrition counseling services at Antenatal Care and Child Welfare Clinic and how to provide care in a respectful manner. We also enriched the content of the role plays and group practices for nutrition counseling services and respectful care.

Way Forward

The revision work was completed in September 2020. The revised training materials and the program will be tested in major hospital health worker training in Grater Accra region and Oti region for the finalization. Currently, the project national staff and Japanese experts are working hard hand in hand for the preparation of the training in the two regions with the new 4-day program.