The effect of training on the reporting of notifiable diseases among health workers in Yobe State, Nigeria.

The generation of data through disease surveillance and notification system is critical to appropriate planning and implementation of disease control programmes, outbreak investigation, emergency preparedness and response. Health workers therefore need to be trained, retrained and updated on the principles and practice of disease surveillance and notification. This quasi-experimental study compared a study and control group "before and after" an intervention (training programme) in the study group. The Experimental and control LGA's were selected using a multistage, stratified random sampling technique. Overall, three LGA's were selected and enrolled in each of the groups. In each of the selected LGA's, all functional health facilities and personnel that fulfilled the inclusion criteria were then included in the study. The total number of participants in the experimental and control groups were 73 and 71 respectively at baseline. The proportion of personnel who were aware of the surveillance system increased from 35.6% to 91.9% (p=0.00) and the mean knowledge score increased from 0.85+/-1.38SD to 6.152.64SD (p=0.00) post intervention in the experimental group. The percentage completeness was 2.3% before and 52.0% after (p-0.00), while the percentage timeliness was 0.0% before and 42.9% after (p=0.00) in the experimental group. These statistically significant differences were however not demonstrated in the control group. Training therefore had a positive effect on health personnel knowledge, reporting requirement and the timeliness and completeness of the disease surveillance and notification system.