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The Laro Kwo Project: A train the trainer model combined with mobile health technology for community health workers in Northern Uganda

Community Health Workers (CHWs) in low and middle income countries (LMICs) provide invaluable health resources to their community members. Best practices for developing and sustaining CHW training programs in LMICs have yet to be defined using rigorous standards and measures of effectiveness. With t...

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Autores principales: Ebbs, Daniel, Benson, Oyoo, Jasicki, Stanton, McCollum, Sarah, Cappello, Michael
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10191267/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37195969
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0001290
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author Ebbs, Daniel
Benson, Oyoo
Jasicki, Stanton
McCollum, Sarah
Cappello, Michael
author_facet Ebbs, Daniel
Benson, Oyoo
Jasicki, Stanton
McCollum, Sarah
Cappello, Michael
author_sort Ebbs, Daniel
collection PubMed
description Community Health Workers (CHWs) in low and middle income countries (LMICs) provide invaluable health resources to their community members. Best practices for developing and sustaining CHW training programs in LMICs have yet to be defined using rigorous standards and measures of effectiveness. With the expansion of digital health to LMICs, few studies have evaluated the role of participatory methodologies combined with the use of mobile health (mHealth) for CHW training program development. We completed a three-year prospective observational study aligned with the development of a community-based participatory CHW training program in Northern Uganda. Twenty-five CHWs were initially trained using a community participatory training methodology combined with mHealth and a train-the-trainer model. Medical skill competency exams were evaluated after the initial training and annually thereafter to assess retention with use of mHealth. After three years, CHWs who advanced to trainer status redeveloped all program materials using a mHealth application and trained a new cohort of 25 CHWs. Implementation of this methodology coupled with longitudinal mHealth training demonstrated an improvement in medical skills over three years among the original cohort of CHWs. Further, we found that the train-the-trainer model with mHealth was highly effective, as the new cohort of 25 CHWs trained by the original CHWs exhibited higher scores when tested on medical skill competencies. The combination of mHealth and participatory methodologies can facilitate the sustainability of CHW training programs in LMIC. Further investigations should focus on comparing specific mHealth modalities for training and clinical outcomes using similar combined methodologies.
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spelling pubmed-101912672023-05-18 The Laro Kwo Project: A train the trainer model combined with mobile health technology for community health workers in Northern Uganda Ebbs, Daniel Benson, Oyoo Jasicki, Stanton McCollum, Sarah Cappello, Michael PLOS Glob Public Health Research Article Community Health Workers (CHWs) in low and middle income countries (LMICs) provide invaluable health resources to their community members. Best practices for developing and sustaining CHW training programs in LMICs have yet to be defined using rigorous standards and measures of effectiveness. With the expansion of digital health to LMICs, few studies have evaluated the role of participatory methodologies combined with the use of mobile health (mHealth) for CHW training program development. We completed a three-year prospective observational study aligned with the development of a community-based participatory CHW training program in Northern Uganda. Twenty-five CHWs were initially trained using a community participatory training methodology combined with mHealth and a train-the-trainer model. Medical skill competency exams were evaluated after the initial training and annually thereafter to assess retention with use of mHealth. After three years, CHWs who advanced to trainer status redeveloped all program materials using a mHealth application and trained a new cohort of 25 CHWs. Implementation of this methodology coupled with longitudinal mHealth training demonstrated an improvement in medical skills over three years among the original cohort of CHWs. Further, we found that the train-the-trainer model with mHealth was highly effective, as the new cohort of 25 CHWs trained by the original CHWs exhibited higher scores when tested on medical skill competencies. The combination of mHealth and participatory methodologies can facilitate the sustainability of CHW training programs in LMIC. Further investigations should focus on comparing specific mHealth modalities for training and clinical outcomes using similar combined methodologies. Public Library of Science 2023-05-17 /pmc/articles/PMC10191267/ /pubmed/37195969 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0001290 Text en © 2023 Ebbs et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Ebbs, Daniel
Benson, Oyoo
Jasicki, Stanton
McCollum, Sarah
Cappello, Michael
The Laro Kwo Project: A train the trainer model combined with mobile health technology for community health workers in Northern Uganda
title The Laro Kwo Project: A train the trainer model combined with mobile health technology for community health workers in Northern Uganda
title_full The Laro Kwo Project: A train the trainer model combined with mobile health technology for community health workers in Northern Uganda
title_fullStr The Laro Kwo Project: A train the trainer model combined with mobile health technology for community health workers in Northern Uganda
title_full_unstemmed The Laro Kwo Project: A train the trainer model combined with mobile health technology for community health workers in Northern Uganda
title_short The Laro Kwo Project: A train the trainer model combined with mobile health technology for community health workers in Northern Uganda
title_sort laro kwo project: a train the trainer model combined with mobile health technology for community health workers in northern uganda
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10191267/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37195969
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0001290
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