Engagement of health workers and peer educators from the National Adolescent Health Programme-Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram during the COVID-19 pandemic: Findings from a situational analysis

  1. Monika Arora
  2. Stefanie Dringus
  3. Deepika Bahl
  4. Zoya Rizvi
  5. Heeya Maity
  6. Smritima Lama
  7. Amanda J. Mason-Jones
  8. Deepak Kumar
  9. Prairna Koul
  10. Shalini Bassi

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Abstract

To understand the impact of COVID-19 on implementation of the peer education programme of the National Adolescent Health Programme-Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram (RKSK); repurposing of the RKSK health workers and Peer Educators (PEs) in COVID-19 response activities and effect on adolescents´ health and development issues.

Methods

Virtual in-depth interviews were conducted with stakeholders (n = 31) (aged 15 to 54 years) engaged in the implementation of the RKSK and peer education programme at state, district, block, and village levels in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra (India). These interviews were thematically coded and analysed to address the research objectives.

Results

Despite most peer education programme activities being stopped, delayed, or disrupted during the pandemic and subsequent lockdown, some communication networks previously established, helped facilitate public health communication regarding COVID-19 and RKSK, between health workers, PEs, and adolescents. There was repurposing of RKSK health workers and PEs’ role towards COVID-19 response-related activities. PEs, with support from health workers, were involved in disseminating COVID-19 information, maintaining migrant and quarantine records, conducting household surveys for recording COVID-19 active cases and providing essential items (grocery, sanitary napkins, etc.) to communities and adolescents.

Conclusion

PEs with support from community health workers are able to play a crucial role in meeting the needs of the communities during a pandemic. There is a need to further engage, involve and build the skills of PEs to support the health system. PEs can be encouraged by granting more visibility and incorporating their role more formally by paying them within the public health system in India.

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  1. Version published to 10.1371/journal.pone.0266758
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2022.03.28.22273059: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    EthicsConsent: Participants who provided their consent were included in the study.
    IRB: Ethics approval for the research was obtained from the Institutional Ethics Committee of the Public Health Foundation of India (Reference # TRC-IEC-342.1/17).
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Despite the novel findings presented in this paper, a few study limitations are worth considering. All interviews were audio-recorded thus participants’ non-verbal cues could not be captured, which could have enriched descriptions of experiences and situations in the study. Due to snowball sampling the number of participants at state, district, and village levels were not equal. Thus, there could be reporting bias by the participants due to their difference in the level of engagement with programme implementation. In context to the impact of COVID-19 on adolescent health and development issues, we have captured the perspective of various stakeholders other than PEs. As indicated by the stakeholder, there was a limited impact so we did not explore these issues further by gender, socio-economic status, marital status, etc. We could not include adolescents who are part of RKSK in this study, thus the beneficiary perspective is missing. Finally, our study was limited to a few participants from two states, limiting our findings’ generalizability. All the above limitations will be considered while conducting an ongoing larger study with a bigger set of participants in the same study sites.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

    About SciScore

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2022.03.28.22273059v1 on medRxiv