How much does quality of child care vary between health workers with differing durations of training? An observational multicountry study
Article
This study compared the performance of different categories of health workers who are trained in Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) but with different duration of pre-service training. Results shows that the IMCI training is associated with much the same quality of child care across different cadres of health workers irrespective of the length of their pre-service training.
The paper supports the principle of task shifting as an important component of health systems strengthening strategy in underserved areas. Thus training and deployment of motivated health workers with shorter duration of pre-service training in underserved areas or regions with high child mortality will result in substantial increase in the coverage of services.