Augmenting hospital support of maternal and child health care, Saudi Arabia

This paper describes the Saudi maternal and child health training programme [1988-1997] to augment hospital support of health centres. Maternal and child health trainer/trainee manuals were prepared, then implemented through 4-day trainers workshops and 2week trainee courses. Mid-term evaluation and follow-up demonstrated reasonable coverage and quality of training. Improved integration of care was reflected by a trainers attitude questionnaire and a trainees interview/observation questionnaire. To date, 589 trainers have been trained, three-quarters of them from hospitals. They in turn have trained about 7658 trainees, 93% of target. The programme is ongoing with continuous updating of content