Evaluation of the educational impact of the WHO essential newborn care course in Zambia

Objectives: To evaluate the effectiveness of the World Health Organization (WHO) Essential Newborn Care (ENC) course in improving knowledge and skills of nurse midwives in low-risk delivery clinics in a developing country. Methods: The investigators identified the content specifications of the training material, developed both written and performance evaluations and administered the evaluations both before and after training clinical nurse midwives in Zambia. Findings: Based on these evaluations, both the knowledge and skills of the nurse midwives improved significantly following the course (from a mean of 65% correct pretraining to 84% correct post-training and from 65% to 77% correct on the performance and written evaluations, respectively). The ENC course written evaluation was validated and both tools allowed evaluation of the ENC course training. Conclusions: We found significant improvements in trainees' knowledge and skills in essential newborn care following the WHO ENC course; however, lack of basic resources may have limited the application of the ENC guidelines. Implementation of the ENC course should be undertaken in consideration with the local conditions available for newborn care.