Capacity building in counseling service to staffs in primary care unit (PCU) Chonburi hospital

Abstract

This was a study to build the capacity of PCU staff members in Muang district of Chonburi province in providing client-center counseling service by participatory learning training program. The purpose of this study to assess knowledge, attitude and skills on client-center counseling service among 22 PCU staff members working in 11 PCUs which are under the supervision of Chonburi Hospital. The study was implemented into two phases. The first phase was a workshop to provide knowledge about client-center counseling theory for three days. The secondary phase was a seven month on-the-job training program in providing counseling for hypertension patients at the PCU to continuously improve counseling skills of PCU staff. During this program, after 4 and 7 months on duty, a workshop will be organized to evaluate attitudes and skills of the staff that have undergone the on-the-job training program. And because several PCU staff members dropped off from the attitude and skill evaluation, a focus group discussion was decided to conduct with the PCU staff to evaluate achievements of this project and seek other possibilities to further develop the project in the future. The results after the 3-day intensive training, PCU staff had a higher level of knowledge of the client centered counseling at a statistical significance (p-value = .031) and the number of the staff with “good” and “very good” levels increased from 68.10% to 77.30%. The mean after the 3-day training was higher than before the training at 0.95%. The comparison of the PCU staff’s attitudes before an on-the-job training program and 4 months after the on-the-job training was found that they had more positive attitudes towards counseling and it showed a statistical significance (p-value = .000). The number of staff with “good level” of attitudes increased considerably from 22.7% to 78.9% and the mean of the attitude score after the on-the-job training increased by 7.79%. In this study the researcher cannot make any conclusion in terms of quantity on PCU staff’s client centered counseling skills at the fourth and seventh months after the on-the-job training program due to insufficient quantitative data for statistical analysis. From the result of the focus group discussion with PCU staff, they felt more self-confident and strongly believed that they could use their acquired knowledge to organize and provide counseling services for their clients after 3 day intensive training. All of PCU staff agreed that this project was useful for general populations and for themselves, monitoring and evaluation of this program at every 3 months and 6 months was quite useful as it allowed them to learn continuously from resource persons and made them feel more confident in providing counseling services. However, some PCU staff members suggested the intensive training program should have included a session for them to practice giving counseling to actual clients.