Community-based training of medical students is associated with malaria prevention and treatment seeking behaviour for children under 5 years in Uganda: a study of MESAU-MEPI COBERS in Uganda

Abstract

BackgroundFour university medical training institutions in Uganda have trained students at off-site health facilities under community-based education and Research Service (COBERS) programme for over 5 years. One of the major components of COBERS placement is for the students to provide health education in the communities about malaria as a major public health disease in Uganda. This study seeks to assess if targeted community-based medical education programme is associated with better prevention and treatment seeking behaviours in the management of malaria, a leading cause of morbidity and mortality of children under five in Uganda.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was done to compare communities around health facilities where medical students were placed at COBERS sites with communities around similar health facilities where medical students were not placed (non-COBERS sites). We randomly selected two villages near each health facility and consecutively selected 10 households per village for interviews using nearest-neighbour method. We used a structured questionnaire to interview household heads on malaria prevention and treatment seeking behaviour for children under 5 years. We performed univariate analysis to determine site and demographic characteristics and performed a multivariate logistic regression to assess association between dependant and independent variables.ResultsFive hundred twenty-three (66.8%) of the children under 5 years in COBERS communities slept under Insecticide Treated Nets (ITNs) the night before survey compared with 1451 (57.8%) in non-COBERS communities (AOR = 0.66, p = 0.017). 100 (60.0%) of children under 5 years in COBERS communities sought care for fever within 24 h of onset compared with 268 (47.0%) in non-COBERS communities (AOR = 0.71, P = 0.009).ConclusionThe presence of COBERS in communities is associated with improved malaria prevention and treatment-seeking behaviour for parents of children under 5 years. Further study needs to be done to determine the long-term impact of COBERS training program on malaria control and prevention in Uganda, along with other effects of COBERS.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12909-018-1250-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Analysis of Decision Making of Energy Enterprises on Adaptive Behavior Amid COVID-19

“…Adaptation has been high on the global policy agendas on public health and economic recovery, and research efforts on adaptability brook no delay as the virus continues to spread, while pandemic prevention and control becomes part of the "new normal". Such studies were carried out by a great number of scholars across the world, and they focused on how local governments, along with urban and rural communities, took measures to adapt and respond to pandemics or public health emergencies of international concern, such as influenza (Nigmatulina and Larson, 2009;Kim et al, 2014;Reissman et al, 2011), malaria (Shretta et al, 2017;Obol et al, 2018), SARS (Leung and Won, 2005), Ebola (Abayomiet al 2019;Carter et al, 2017), and COVID-19 (Angel and Mudrazija, 2020). Beyond that, some examined changes to trade policies given the spread of a pandemic and global economic recession (Pak et al, 2020;Brenton and Chemutai, 2020), while others studied how small and medium-sized businesses broke through, survived, and reenergized in a pandemic crisis (Zhang and Han, 2020).…”