Project News

The project conducted training for regional and district facilitators in September 2021.
(See Project News "Training of trainers; total 939 facilitators were trained")

15 District facilitators of the three control districts^[1] in Ashanti Region went through the TOT and they conducted health worker training in each district after the TOT, conducted 6th October till 12th November. 10 batches of training were conducted, and 342 health workers participated in the training. Health workers trained were midwives, community health nurses, and nutrition officers who provide MCH and nutrition services utilizing the MCH RB at hospitals, health centers, CHPS (Community Health Planning and Services) compounds, and community. All participants went through the lectures, practical sessions at the training venue as well as at the health facilities and successfully completed the training. This was the final health worker training that the project conducted across the country and the project trained 1642 health workers on the effective use of MCH RB in Ghana.

Training

Initially, we wanted to use the same training schedule for the facilitator's training, which was a four-day training including two days of hospital practice. Yet we changed it after discussions among the instructors. The practical sessions at the hospital were concentrated into the fourth day only as it took a lot of time to move to the training site and secure mothers and children for the training over two days.

While the district facilitators facilitated the training mainly, regional facilitators supported them upon necessity and ensured the quality of the training. Participants enjoyed practical sessions of the nutrition counseling services utilizing the locally available food.

Health workers enjoyed participating in the game-style group exercise, such as nutritional guidance using actual locally available food samples and the age-appropriate dietary guidance for children using the card game. They cheered when they found the correct answer.

Training in three districts demonstrated unique characteristics. The training started in Ejisu and the facilitators in Ejisu faced some difficulties to facilitate the training in the first week.

In Ejisu district, where the first training was held, the facilitators were initially confused about how to proceed, and the regional facilitators supported them in the first week. Eventually they were able to confidently conduct effective training from the second week.

In Kwabre East, facilitators conducted training smoothly with the good teamwork.

In Asante Akim South, the training was interrupted with the frequent power failure and water outages, which hampered the progress of the training. It was difficult for participants to concentrated on training without A/C or fan as it was hot and humid at this time of the year there. The regional facilitators supported district facilitators and asked lot of questions and providing interesting roll-play to attract participants attention to the training contents under the unfavorable conditions,

Way forwards

We have recorded the health worker training in Kwabre East for the project documentary movie. We were impressed by the training conducted with the participatory approach with using the locally available food sample coordinated by the teamwork of regional and district facilitators,

We were impressed by the way the regional and district facilitators cooperated and proceeded one after the other with accustomed procedures, introducing MCH RB and Nutrition counseling techniques, applying participatory training approaches, and locally available food items. We started the first health worker training in Ashanti Region in 2016 to conduct a pretest of the MCH RB. We have developed and updated the training materials, training methods, and trained facilitators science then. We are grateful for the hard-working counterpart and experts who have worked diligently to conduct quality training all over the country with quality training materials and innovative approaches.

Exercise of length measurement of a child at a clinic

Group card-game exercise on age-appropriate feeding guidance for a child

Group exercise on the nutrition guidance utilizing locally available food items

Exercise of height measurement of a child at a clinic