A role of community nurses and challenges faced by them toward providing MCH services in selected blocks in West Bengal: A cross-sectional study

Background and Aims: Community nurses have been providing health care to communities for many decades and have assumed a variety of roles, including community empowerment, the provision of services, and linking communities with health facilities. They face many challenges while providing community service. The present study has been conducted to assess the role of community nurses toward maternal and child health (MCH) services and to find out the challenges toward providing MCH services. Materials and Methods: After Institutional Ethics Committee approval, data were collected from 100 community nurses through multistage sampling. Data were collected through semi-structured and structured interview schedules. All tools were tested for validity and reliability before data collection. Data analysis was done through descriptive and inferential statistics. Results: Most of the community nurses adopted the role of educator (98.43%), administrator (97.63%), supervisor (95.5%), and coordinator (93.63%), respectively, toward MCH services; however, only 84.9% and 80%, respectively, performed a care provider’s and a collaborator’s role. The most common challenges faced by the community nurses were overburden, due to a high inflow of patients at the OPD (78%), the overload of handling written documents, and online data entry (69%). Conclusion: Administrators need to take proper steps to reduce the challenges faced by the community nurses, and there is a need for constant supervision and timely training for the community nurses.