Peer Groups for Primary Healthcare Providers in Ukraine: Professional Development and Burnout Prevention during the COVID-19 Pandemic

## **Digital Capacity Building of Front-Line Workers for Improving Care and Development of Young Children Amid COVID-19**

**Harish Kumar1 and Devina Bajpayee2**

<sup>1</sup> Ipe Global, New Delhi, India <sup>2</sup> SAMVEG Project

Appropriate nutrition and nurturing care in the first 1000 days go a long way in helping children thrive.

Realizing its economic, nutritional, and other benefits, India strengthened its home-based newborn care (HBNC) through additional visits and launched a program called "Home Based Care of Young Child" (HBYC) in 2017. Under this program, a community health worker conducts home visits for all children in her area at the 3rd, 6th, 9th, 12th, and 15th months of age. Implementing HBYC is a challenge due to a large number of functionaries needing capacity building and large monitoring data. The problem was further exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic with various restrictions. IPE Global, supported by USAID, shouldered the responsibility to support alternate modes of capacity building amidst the pandemic. A webbased learning management system (LMS) was developed in partnership with Laerdal Global Health for the capacity building of front-line workers in three districts of Jharkhand. The state HMIS revealed that 48% of community workers were trained on HBYC at baseline in the three identified districts. The LMS was introduced with state-level trainers and ASHA supervisors (who also work as trainers for their colleagues). Out of the 181 ASHA facilitators in the three districts, 52 used the LMS for self-learning in the first three months. An assessment carried out three months later revealed a significantly higher knowledge level on diarrhea and pneumonia management, referral indications, and parenting tips, even though the training duration with the e-module is shorter (50%) than the earlier traditional training. Further, the state government's approval of LMS for scaled-up use for training ASHAs has resulted in the initiation of training of 3191 untrained ASHA workers in the state. The tool prompts role clarity and prompts front-line functionaries to comply with various counseling actions, including reporting, and has improved real-time data submission and analysis. Data of 20,788 home visits covering 58% of children registered are now available. The digital solution has demonstrated potential for mainstreaming HBYC and building capacity and compliance for data reporting by front-line health workers to maximize the benefits of the 1000-day window period for improving child health outcomes in LMICs.

### Potential Advantages of E-HBYC

#### Authors

Harish Kumar<sup>1</sup> and Devina Bajpayee<sup>2</sup>

<sup>1</sup> Ipe Global, New Delhi, India <sup>2</sup> SAMVEG Project

#### Home-Based Care for Young Children

The platform uses structured home visits by ASHAs to young children of 3 to 15 months of age.

#### Objectives


**E-LMS**





#### **e-Reporting**

tool;


frontline workers.

#### SAMVEG: Systems Approach for MNCH focusing on Vulnerable Geographies In Association with
