Impact of training of primary healthcare workers on integrated community case management of childhood illnesses in North-West district of Benue State, Nigeria

The World Health Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund has introduced Integrated Community Case Management of childhood illness (ICCM) in order to train health workers at community level on how to treat children below 5 years who have pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria. Since Primary Health Care workers in Benue State are actively involved in caring for sick children at community level, there is every need for them to be trained on ICCM. The objective of this study is to find out if training of primary health care workers in North-West district of Benue State can improve their knowledge on ICCM. The study was carried out in Benue North-west where Gboko Local government was randomly selected out of seven local governments. Health Officers’ in-charge of 38 Primary Health Care Clinics were selected for the study and were trained based on our adapted ICCM training manual. The Pre and Post training assessment test for this study was designed based on the training manual. A paired sample t-test was conducted to find out if there were any significant difference in the knowledge of primary health care workers before and after receiving training. There was significant difference in the pre training scores ( x1 = 136.684, S1 = 37.370) and post-training scores (x2 =177.895, 2 S =14.469) at (t=6.783, P=0.000). This result strongly indicates that the teaching intervention has improved the knowledge of the Primary Health Care  workers on ICCM in Gboko Local Government. Keywords: ICCM; Pneumonia; Malaria; Diarrhoea