Thanks for being with us.
We're going to continue our discussion preparing
the health workers, training of trainers.
As we said before, the training of trainers is extremely important.
The health workers need to understand the process
of working with volunteers, how they can become facilitators.
They're not going out and telling people, you select three, four people.
Or you select one person, and, so that the community is supportive.
Get them to make the community take responsibility for the health program.
And for the volunteers.
we need to, again, get the health
workers to understand how volunteer work helps them.
Clearly, if less people are coming in for Malaria treatment,
because they've gotten it as soon as they need it.
It will reduce the workload.
At the same time, it will increase the coverage.
And they can report those statistics.
Because more people are helping them provide the treatment that people need.
The increased contact with the community is very important.
it builds trust.
If the community has concerns, they will bring it to
the health worker, and they can resolve problems more easily.
And again, if the health worker is showing interest in the community,
people will be more responsive to new ideas from the health worker.
Again, as we're talking about the, the issue of adult learning that
we've talked about, the idea is transferring of skills from
nurses health inspectors, front-line staff, to volunteers.
And we need to adjust our training methods to the best way that the volunteers learn.
We can't guarantee in many remote communities
that we can always find people who can read and write.
So the health workers themselves need to
draw on training methods that are more visual.
More participatory.
Things like role plays. demonstrations.
Return demonstrations. using illustration.
Talking about motivation.
For example, personal testimony about successful treatment of malaria.
Getting the community members involved.
Telling stories, story telling is a very important thing.
We'll talk more about that.
Traditional proverb, not that the health worker knows all the proverbs
[LAUGH]
in the area.
But this is a way of drawing ideas from the trainees, from the community members.
To help them, as adults, learn more themselves.
Now, health workers, as we said, not only do the training, not only stock the
supplies, but as much as possible, they
need to reach out and supervise the community.
We know, in most places transportation is a challenge, and
sometimes what's happened is that by
organizing monthly meetings in a central place.
Say, people do need to come to market.
People come to a town for, for other kinds
of reasons on Fridays, Sundays, or what have you.
If we know people are coming to a central location
at a certain time, can plan opportunities for the health workers
to meet the volunteers, and so supervision ideally should occur in the community.
Because part of it may be problem solving with the community leaders.
If there's some dissatisfaction.
But if not, at least getting together where
everybody would naturally come on, on certain occasions.
Supervision with checklists is very important.
It should be based on the skills that were taught during
the the basic training, and then going back out to see if
the, the volunteers are treating malaria, for example, by steps
that they were taught to do in terms of identifying if
the person has potential signs and symptoms of malaria, like fever.
we've trained volunteers in the village to use the rapid diagnostic
test, watching them, the checklist, to
see that they followed the procedures correctly.
That they picked the right medicine for the age of the person.
That they explain this.
So all of the supervisory checklists are very, very important.
Again, all of this information coming from the field should help the health workers
sit down and think about how effective they are in transferring these skills, and
getting these ideas, and getting the services out to people.
And one thing that helps very much is what we call feedback to the volunteers.
This is a basic supervisory principle anyway.
But one thing that sometimes happens is that we've done in Nigeria, is when we've
used the checklist in the community, then
at the upcoming monthly meeting of the volunteers.
the health
worker share some of their general observations,
well we noticed, out of the 20 volunteers,
that ten of them did not wash their
hands before they started doing the malaria test.
And well, what can we do about that, and then the volunteers can discuss,
well we had a problem of getting soap or there's water at this and that.
Okay, let's do problem solving.
And so involving the trainees well, who are no longer trainees
but involving the volunteers in solving the performance problems that they have.
Some of it may be solving problems related to community support.
