Public health nutrition capacity: assuring the quality of workforce preparation for scaling up nutrition programmes

Abstract

Objective: To describe why and how capacity-building systems for scaling up nutrition programmes should be constructed in low-and middle-income countries (LMIC). Design: Position paper with task force recommendations based on literature review and joint experience of global nutrition programmes, public health nutrition (PHN) workforce size, organization, and pre-service and in-service training. Setting: The review is global but the recommendations are made for LMIC scaling up multisectoral nutrition programmes. Subjects: The multitude of PHN workers, be they in the health, agriculture, education, social welfare, or water and sanitation sector, as well as the community workers who ensure outreach and coverage of nutrition-specific and -sensitive interventions. Results: Overnutrition and undernutrition problems affect at least half of the global population, especially those in LMIC. Programme guidance exists for undernutrition and overnutrition, and priority for scaling up multisectoral programmes for tackling undernutrition in LMIC is growing. Guidance on how to organize and scale up such programmes is scarce however, and estimates of existing PHN workforce numbers -although poor -suggest they are also inadequate. Pre-service nutrition training for a PHN workforce is mostly clinical and/or food science oriented and in-service nutrition training is largely restricted to infant and young child nutrition. Conclusions: Unless increased priority and funding is given to building capacity for scaling up nutrition programmes in LMIC, maternal and child undernutrition rates are likely to remain high and nutrition-related non-communicable diseases to escalate. A hybrid distance learning model for PHN workforce managers' in-service training is urgently needed in LMIC.

Nutritional status and food intake of women residing in rural and urban areas of Lesotho

“…These socio-demographic factors may be related to food intake, as higher education attainment is associated with better food knowledge and better income, enabling improved accessibility to a variety of foods. 15,16 These findings are also in line with the National and United rankings of Lesotho and considered to be major challenges that contribute to food insecurity. 17 Of concern is the high prevalence of obesity in both rural and especially urban participants included in this study.…”

Nutrition education during pregnancy: Are final year midwifery trainees ready to offer this service?

“…The poor performance of the final year students in general in the present study can perhaps be attributed to the little emphasis or priority given to nutrition education during the training of midwives (Arish et al, 2016;Sodjinou et al, 2014). Other factors include the level of nutritional competences exhibited by tutors (Sethuraman et al, 2015) and issues related to the lack of essential aspects of human nutrition in courses taught (Shrimpton et al, 2016). In this study, majority (94.3%) of the final year students indicated that they studied only one nutrition course throughout the entire three year duration of the training programme.…”

Educational training of nutritionists in Public Health Nutrition: A systematic review

“…Low-and middle-income countries deserve greater attention [52,53] because their nutrition-related workforce needs to tackle maternal and child undernutrition, which are the objectives to sustainable development [52].…”