Quality of childcare provided by Community Oriented Resource Persons (CORPS) trained on integrated community case management one-year post donor funding in Niger State, North-Central, Nigeria

Donor-funded Integrated Community Case Management (iCCM) of childhood illnesses was implemented in Niger state to expand access to underserved children with diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia diseases. For the intervention to achieve the desired goals quality of childcare provided by trained Community Oriented Resource Persons (CORPs) must be optimal and sustained beyond the donor funded period. This was a cross-sectional descriptive study in which trained research teams visited randomly sampled CORPs (n = 291) trained to provide iCCM services at the selected intervention hard-to-reach communities and observed the provision of services for sick children and conducted ‘gold-standard’ re-examination of the sick child. The CORPs assessed 42 (73.7%) of the children with fever, classified 31 (66.0%) with malaria using RDT correctly and treated 31 (66.0%) of the children correctly using recommended ACT. Similarly, the CORPs assessed 15 (88.2%) of the children with cough, classified 13 (76.5%) by counting RR correctly and treated 13 (82.4%) of the children correctly with recommended antibiotics. Six (85.7%) of the children with watery stool were assessed for dehydration by the CORPs and correctly classified and treated all the 7 (100%) children with diarrhoea using ORS. Forty-nine (79.0%) of the CORPs had recommended ACT, 33 (53.2%) had Amoxycillin D and 31 (50%) had ORS in stock on the day of the survey. CORPS was still able to deliver reasonable quality childcare services to children one-year post donor funding and mothers/caregivers of the children expressed satisfaction with quality of services provided by the CORPs.