Impact of capacity building interventions on individual and organizational competency for HPSR in endemic disease control in Nigeria: a qualitative study

Abstract

Background: The need to build capacity for health policy and systems research (HPSR) in low-and middle-income countries has been underscored as this encompasses the processes of decision-making at all levels of the health system. This implementation research project was undertaken in Southeast Nigeria to evaluate whether the capacity-building intervention improves the capacity to produce and use research evidence for decision making in endemic disease control. Methods: Three training workshops were organized for purposively selected participants comprising "producers of evidence" such as health research scientists in three universities and "users of evidence" such as policy makers, program managers, and implementers in the public health sector. Participants also held step-down workshops in their organizations. The last workshop was used to facilitate the formation of knowledge networks comprising of both producers and users, which is a critical step for getting research into policy and practice (GRIPP). Three months after the workshops, a subset, 40, of workshop participants was selected for in-depth interviews. Information was collected on (i) perceptions of usefulness of capacity-building workshops, (ii) progress with proposed research and research uptake activities, (iii) effects of these activities on evidence-informed decision making, and (iv) constraints and enablers to implementation of proposed activities.

Health research capacity building of health workers in fragile and conflict-affected settings: a scoping review of challenges, strengths, and recommendations

“…Included articles, as represented in Fig. 2, reflected an HRCB initiative conducted in Nigeria (n = 6) [39][40][41][42][43][44], Haiti (n = 4) [45][46][47][48], Zimbabwe (n = 4) [40,[49][50][51], Liberia (n = 3) [42,52,53], Burkina Faso (n = 2) [54,55], Solomon Islands (n = 2) [56,57], Dominican Republic of Congo (n = 1) [52], Cameroon (n = 1) [54], Gambia (n = 1) [52], and Lebanon (n = 1) [58], most of which were published after 2015 (85%). Those initiatives centred around topics such as general health research methodology (70%), communicable diseases (30%), global surgery (10%), health education (10%), health policy and systems research (10%), mental health (10%), and epidemiology (5%).…”

“…Finally, this was also related to another systemic challenge associated with the sustainability of these programmes given that with the absence of locally driven governance and leadership, such programmes had very little chances of surviving and imparting long-term impact [42,44,52,55,56]. language used to deliver the HRCB intervention was at times not the first language of participants [41,[54][55][56][57].…”

“…Studies indicated that the low rate of participant engagement when tasked with evaluating the HRCB initiative limited the collection of adequate data regarding the success of HRCB interventions [53,58]. Furthermore, studies reported concerns regarding the evaluation approach and evaluation tools used to assess the HRCB programmes [44,45,51,53,57]. In particular, a common gap was not collecting data from all members affected by the HRCB intervention, including community members, institutional leadership, and health workers not directly involved in the HRCB programme but whose work may be impacted by it.…”

“…The studies discussed that this gap prevented researchers from fully determining the impact of the HRCB intervention on the broader organizations, community, and system levels over the long term. Additionally, studies reported the difficulty in assessing the practical and behavioural impact of HRCB interventions due to inadequate evaluation tools to assess such distal outcomes [43,44,51,53]. In particular, studies highlighted the inadequacy of pre-/post-training tests and self-reported questionnaires at capturing the impact of the HRCB intervention on knowledge gained as some of the skills acquired cannot be quantified via such tools.…”

“…Holistic initiatives Studies that implemented a holistic capacity building intervention reported strengths related to providing comprehensive research training to a multidisciplinary population in a sustainable method. Being involved in all the stages of research was identified as important by participants, particularly among earlycareer researchers, as it provided them an opportunity to learn how to coordinate, conduct, and communicate their own research [40,44,57,58]. Additionally, training cohorts that included participants from various health and professional sectors, including veterinary, laboratory, and community health workers for example, promoted further collaborations on local projects [43,52,53,57].…”