Facilitator Resource Kit : Training of Health Care Workers in Child Protection

1. Purpose of this Resource Kit

The purpose of this  kit is to provide facilitators with resources to train nurses and other health care workers to make appropriate interventions when they discover that the children in their care have been abused. The kit is built on the information which Everychild Guyana and Help & Shelter have used in their work against child abuse

The resource kit provides notes, activities and handouts. It contains a schedule of four sessions to be conducted in periods of two to two and half hours each. The facilitators and participants could work on the scheduling of the workshop if there is a different time allocated

2. Philosophy of learning

This kit assumes that the facilitators will be using a constructivist approach to learning in which the nurses and health care workers would be active participants in the learning. At the same time, there will be appropriate interventions to share facts and other information which may be new to the nurses.

3. The Learning Objectives are as follows:-

By the end of the Session 1, the participants should be able to:

• Define child abuse.
• Explain their role in preventing child abuse.
• Recognise cultural and personal factors which may hinder appropriate interventions in cases of child abuse.

By the end of the Session 2, the participants should be able to:

• Identify physical and behavioural indicators of child abuse.
• State the risk factors contributing to child abuse.
• Describe the effects of child abuse.

By the end of the Session 3, the participants should be able to:

• Link the stages of children development with the appropriate interventions.
• Identify helping strategies for children who have been abused.
• Identify techniques to probe suspicions of child abuse.

By the end of the Session 4, the participants should be able to:

• List situations in which health workers must report suspected cases of maltreatment.
• Demonstrate their capacity to take action in protecting a child by filing a child abuse report and using other strategies.
• Describe the legal framework for reporting child abuse.Other learning objectives

Facilitators are encouraged to let participants also state their own learning objectives. They should encourage the participants to identify other strategies for addressing questions which they still have during the final evaluation.

The complete kit can be downloaded, or the various session outlines, handouts and worksheets.