Improving the Village Health Volunteers’ Knowledge, Malaria Diagnostic Skill and Home Visits through the Observed Training

Municipality of Tidore Islands in North Maluku province, Indonesia, where this study conducted was a malaria endemic area. The malaria Annual Parasite Incidence in this area was 10.8 per 1000 inhabitants in 2010, 8.3 per 1000 inhabitants in 2011, 7.5 per 1000 inhabitants in 2012, 6.11 per 1000 inhabitants in 2013 and 2.10 per 1000 inhabitants in 2014, 2.10 per 1000 inhabitants in 2015. Geographically, this area is consisting of a number of separated islands. This reality reflects the complexity of delivering access, especially health care access to all those separated remote areas.

The aim of this study was to increase village health volunteers’ knowledge of malaria and diagnostic skill and home visit through observed training and to analyze the correlation between the knowledge of the village health volunteers toward the diagnostic skill.

This research was a Quasi-experimental research based in the community by observing the effects or developments of the results of training interventionscalled “The One Group Pretest-Posttest Design”. A linear regression analysis also conducted to analyze the correlation of observed health volunteer training toward the knowledge and the correlation between knowledge and the diagnostic skill.

Result: There has been an increase in village health volunteers’ knowledge after the observed training conducted which included knowledge about malaria in general and the provision of skills to diagnose malaria with sensitivity of 73.4% and specificity of 54.2%Village health volunteers’ knowledge was significantly having correlation toward diagnostic skill (p=0.047) and 90.5% patients that visited completely by village health volunteers taking antimalarial drugs regularly.