0:00
In Section B we want to look in
more detail about the realities back on the job.
What is the environment like, are people supportive
of the trainee in applying the new skills?
We found that application of new skills is not always easy.
Response from a trainee attending a workshop.
Every so often I run into people,
I run into someone from the workshop.
And though they are very positive about the trainee experience,
their organizations haven't changed, and they've reverted to their old patterns.
You can see that change is difficult.
Other people who had training programmes had comments.
After the workshop, i went back to my job with new
skills and insights and plans to make things happen in my agency.
It took only a couple of weeks for my bubble to burst.
0:59
These are frustrations that trainees meet. It's not unusual, as we said earlier.
Some people are jealous that they didn't have a chance to
go for the training program and they don't want to listen.
Everyone's busy.
You know, where have you been? We've had to take your work load.
They actually resent the person having gone.
Maybe the work load is so heavy that the trainee doesn't have a
chance to sit down and explain what he or she's learned and share.
Maybe the organization doesn't have proper staff meetings
and things like that where people can exchange ideas.
Maybe the supervisors had not been
consulted before person was sent for training
and they had no idea that the person would come back with new skills.
Maybe, although the training might have been organized around
a new national policy, for example, undergraded management of
childhood illness, maybe the person in charge of the
health center hadn't been informed of this new policy.
And doesn't understand what the person is expected
to do when they come back from the training.
So if we don't take into account these other, broader,
management issues, if we don't involve the various stakeholders in the
diagnostic and evaluation process, the trainees will become frustrated
and won't be able to apply what they've learned.
So what is a trainer to do?
2:17
And again, another comment.
As time went on, my plans schedules, new ideas slid away.
And I realized that I had slipped back
into my old attitudes and ways of doing things.
So, few trainers or training organizations in
developing countries are equipped to remedy these problems.
It's difficult to get out to sites.
It's difficult to get stakeholders involved.
It's difficult to, to reach a consensus.
I'm sure that even happens in, in in industrialized countries, too.
2:46
So we, need to ask, what is the trainer's responsibility?
What can the trainer do to address these issues that
are bound to come up, often times the trainers funding and
their responsibility ends with the
course evaluation. People are sent
from far and near around the country
and the trainers are ready to start a new round of recruitment people coming
in for the next year's course, so they often loose track
of what happens to the trainees.
There's often no mechanism for help, helping them, giving on-going
help, keeping in touch with the trainees and, it's not an easy task.
And the number of rural districts and a mountain less South
West corner of Uganda, you have to actually trek to the village.
It maybe an hour or more before you can reach and
find the village health worker you trained to see what has happened to him or her.
You know, are the resource available, the
time available to do that kind of followup.
Follow-up is often sporadic.
Some foresighted donors may supply follow-up visits to
assess the impact of the training a few months
or weeks later but these visits are the
exception and may tend to be a one-off event.
So the idea of developing a network interaction
among the trainees and trainers.
Again having a training function within your organization that follows
up on people and make sure they apply their skills.
This is often not thought about.
And so, you wind up repeating training over and over again.
People go to work shops, maybe
their transferred, maybe they become frusterated.
New people go and training becomes more of an
academic exercise than a way of building the organization's capacity.
Some different
options have been thought about to address these problems.
May I mention before that during the late 80s, early 90s,
CDC was working on child survival
activities throughout Africa and our centre
at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria was contracted to hold annual
workshops on Program Planning and Implementation
for health education and child survival.
What was built into that
was the need to visit at 6 months and then a year.
The trainees back in their home setting to find out if they had put their plan into
action, if they had learned about their planning skills,
if they were able to secure budgeting et cetera.
And so this follow up consultation as part of training was an important addition
because when you reach the field you
discover that the trainees may have had difficulty
figuring out the politics of their organization, the
procedures for getting plans approved, the budgeting procedures, etcetera.
And by being on-site, the consultant could help
them work through that, and get their plan accepted.
William Brieger, DrPHProfessor, Health Systems Program of the Department of International Health
