Improving the capacity of nurses for non-communicable disease service delivery in India: how do they fare in comparison to doctors?

ABSTRACT

India has witnessed a major shift in morbidity to non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in the last few decades. The service delivery for these long-term conditions has been physician-centred up till now. There is a recent move towards shared care, and nurses are being engaged in the delivery of NCD care. This study was performed in the context of a composite training initiative involving nurses and doctors. Our aim was to compare the performance of nurses with doctors to determine which skills need to be emphasised in future educational programmes. Baseline and end-training knowledge assessments were available from training records. In 2014, of a total of 387 participants from one state in India, 153 were followed up to assess long-term retention of knowledge in various NCD training domains. We found that despite a lower baseline, nurses had a similar attrition in knowledge after training compared to doctors. Results of our study emphasised that nurses can be trained for the primary care needs of NCDs and that both nurses and doctors have retraining needs.

KEYWORDS:

• Non-communicable diseases
• nurses
• doctors
• task- shifting

Acknowledgments

The authors thank all medical officers and nurses for participation in the study, and Ms Priya Bala, and Mr Roshan for coordinating the training events.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical approval

The study was approved by the Institutional Human Ethics Committee (IHEC) of All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhopal.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Public Health and Family Welfare, Government of Madhya Pradesh [Nil].