NEWS

The integrated in-service blended training on reproductive, maternal, neonatal, and child health (RMNCH IRT) for Community Health Workers run by Last Mile Health (LMH) covering four regions in Ethiopia, and engaging more than 1,000 health workers has published their first results and recommendations. In response to this study’s promising results, the Health Ministry of Ethiopia plans to develop additional blended learning modules–and to implement this first module in more districts, reaching a greater number of Ethiopia’s 40,000 community health workers.

Some of the key findings by LMH in the study were the following:

• The blended RMNCH IRT costs less and takes less time to implement while achieving similar knowledge outcomes as conventional IRT, as measured directly after the conclusion of training;
• After training, skills assessment scores among blended IRT learners improved dramatically for all RMNCH key competencies.
• When supervisors received customized learner reports, they used the data to inform follow-up supervision visits.
• The ability to generate and use individual data for targeted supervision is a powerful quality-improvement tool of the blended approach.
• The blended RMNCH IRT provides a more interactive experience for learners and increased availability of training materials to learners after training. These program design components could contribute to sustained improvement in learning outcomes and service delivery, but further measurement would be needed.

You can read more about the project report  here.

It’s been a while since we’ve posted directly about updates that have been made in Oppia, but there has been a long going on and a lot of updates in the last year, including:

• Improvements to notification options;
• New course statuses available;
• Updates and improvements to support for multiple languages;
• Allow locking of quizzes and topics by password;
• Implemented skip logic for feedback activities;
• Improvement to certificates;
• Update to use Python 3.8 and Django 3.2;
• Plus much more.

See the release notes for full details: Releases and Release Notes — OppiaMobile 0.14.1 documentation and how to upgrade to take advantage for these improvements and fixes.

There are several new features coming in the next months, see our roadmap: OppiaMobile Development Roadmap — OppiaMobile 0.14.1 documentation

As always, free free to post on the OppiaMobile community site to ask us any questions

Frontline Health Workers have an important role in improving the reproductive health of adolescent and young people. Young people have needs that are quite different from those of older people and understanding their special needs is key to helping them. Providing them with the appropriate information and services, mobilising the community in support of adolescent and youth reproductive health programmes, and working with and for young people are the major interventions that a Frontline Health Workers can focus on in the community.

You can download the course directly from the OppiaMobile learning app.

COVID-19 Ethiopia is the official FMoH Health Worker learning app supported by the Community Health Academy – Last Mile Health using the OppiaMobile platform technology.

The target audience for this app are all Frontline Health Workers in Ethiopia: nurses, health officers, physicians, volunteers working in health facilities and other health service delivery points set up for COVID-19 across all 11 regions.

Once COVID-19 Ethiopia is downloaded onto a smart phone or tablet, the training content is readily available for use offline. Users earn points for engagement with the course content, and badges when they complete a course. When a course is updated, users are automatically notified that a new version is available, so they can keep their course content up-to-date.

This new version of the training app has already been uploaded on hundreds of tablets that are being distributed by the FMOH to COVID-19 response teams. The official courses and materials offered on the COVID-19-Ethiopia platform are: Surveillance; Case Management; Laboratory; Infection Prevention and Control; Risk Communication and Community Engagement and COVID-19 handbook for Health Workers.

OppiaMobile is an open source mobile learning platform specially designed for delivering learning content such as multimedia and quizzes in low-resource settings. Course content can be developed in Moodle and then exported to run offline on the OppiaMobile Android app.

Users can download the COVID-19 Ethiopia Training App from the Google Playstore.

We have just published in BMC Research Notes a new research paper: “Associations between intestinal parasitic infections, anemia, and diarrhea among school aged children, and the impact of hand-washing and nail clipping”. Here is the abstract:

Objective: In marginalized setting, under‐nutrition and illnesses due to infectious agents create a vicious circle. In our previous study, we reported that easy‐to‐do hand hygiene interventions were effective in preventing intestinal parasite infections (IPIs) and reduce the rate of anaemia among school‐aged children. The aim of this study was to assess the pattern of associations between IPIs, anaemia and diarrhoea among the school‐aged children and to explore if the observed impact of hand‐washing and nail clipping interventions in our finndings was similar across children with different baseline demographic and disease characteristics. The study was based on the analysis of data that was collected during the randomized controlled trial and hence have used the same study participants and study area in Tigray, Ethiopia.

Results: Children with IPIs had a much higher chance of also being anaemic (AOR 2.09, 95% CI 1.15–3.80), having diarrhoea (AOR 2.83, 95% CI 1.57–5.09), and vice versa. Anaemia and diarrhoea were very strongly related (AOR 9.62, 95% CI 5.18–17.85). Overall, hand‐washing with soap at key times and weekly nail clipping were e cacious in preventing intestinal parasite re‐infection among children despite the differences in baseline demographic characteristics.

Unfortunately, a civil war started three months ago in Tigray, Ethiopia, where this research work was conducted. You can follow the latest news in this blog: Nyssen, J., 2021. Catastrophe stalks Tigray, again. Ethiopia Insight