NCT02903602

Sharing Histories: Test of a Teaching Method for Community Health Workers

Health in the Hands of Women: Test of a Community Health Worker Teaching Method "Sharing Histories"

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 600 (actual)
• Sponsor: Future Generations Graduate School · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 23 Months
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness of an innovative methodology for training Community Health Workers that will improve their effectiveness in educating mothers to adopt best practice health behaviors in the home.

Detailed description

Objective: Training of community health workers (CHW) is a growing priority to close the gap between health services and mothers/families in resource poor communities. To address research needs on how to improve effectiveness of CHW training, the investigators tested an innovative CHW teaching methodology called "Sharing Histories" hypothesizing that this would empower and enable CHW to better teach mothers to improve health knowledge and behaviors that contribute to improved child growth. Method: The study was a cluster-randomized controlled trial: 22 health facility jurisdictions were matched and randomly assigned as experimental or control. Health personnel Tutors and female CHW were trained using either the "Sharing Histories" methodology (experimental) or a standard but still participatory teaching method (control). Training content, materials, and other interventions were held constant between study groups. Impact on maternal knowledge and practices, and child growth and morbidity were measured in representative household surveys at baseline, midterm, and final evaluation, with 600 mothers interviewed - 300 in each study group - at each point in time.

Conditions

• Infant Nutrition Disorders
• Health Behavior

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Sharing Histories training method for CHW	Female Community Health Worker training participants were led through a guided process of recalling and sharing their autobiographical memories of their personal experiences in the first 1000 days of each of their children (pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, newborn, breastfeeding, complementary feeding, infant diarrhea and hygiene, pneumonia). On the basis of memories, cultural beliefs and practices are identified and training content is built.
BEHAVIORAL	Standard training method for CHW	Female Community Health Workers were trained with standard participatory teaching method with three phases: identify knowledge, provide new knowledge, evaluate learning.

Timeline

• Start date: 2010-10-01
• Primary completion: 2014-09-01
• Completion: 2014-09-01
• First posted: 2016-09-16
• Last updated: 2016-09-16