Mental health knowledge and skills among preschool nurseries' staff in Alexandria and the effect of an in-service training programme.
Author: El Din AG, Shokeir NF, Ziady HH.
Source:
The Journal of the Egyptian Public Health Association, 77(1-2), 51-71.
Day care centres and kindergartens, have potential effects on children's
physical, social and mental developments. The present study was carried out to
assess the knowledge and skills of nurseries' staff in Alexandria as regard child
mental health, and to evaluate the outcome of an in-service child mental health
training programme. For this purpose 10% of the registered nurseries in
Alexandria were selected by the stratified random sampling technique using
proportional allocation (n = 54) to represent the six districts of Alexandria.
Data were collected from all staff members of selected nurseries present during
the visits to the nurseries (n = 172). A self-administered questionnaire was used
and including general information about the respondents, and their knowledge and
skills regarding child mental health. From the total sample, 52 were randomly
selected to attend a 2-day in-service mental health training programme. Results
of the study revealed deficiency of knowledge and skills of the staff in most of
the tested items. However, staff who were graduates of Faculties of Kindergarten,
Education and Arts were significantly better than other educational categories
regarding the number of correct or partially correct answers. The training
programme proved to cause a significant improvement in knowledge and skills of
the staff in most of the items. It was recommended to increase the staff who have
educational background of kindergarten and education, to give more attention to
continuous evaluation of nurseries' staff knowledge and skills, and to apply a
maintained system of pre and in-service child mental health training programmes
for them.