Breaking the silence of female genital schistosomiasis in Ghana’s health system: A case of health workers within the FAST project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Female Genital Schistosomiasis (FGS) remains a critical and yet neglected topics in Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs), significantly affecting the health of women and girls worldwide. Health workers' knowledge of FGS is vital to the prevention and management of the disease. This study adopted an implementation research approach to identify and address the existing knowledge gap regarding FGS among healthcare workers in Ghana. METHODS: This study was a 3-year (2020-2022) implementation research applying a pragmatic uncontrolled quasi-experimental study design. The study involved a baseline assessment, FGS training intervention for health workers and student nurses, distribution of FGS educational materials, and an endline assessment. A mixed-method approach was applied to data collection involving health workers from two schistosomiasis endemic districts and across the country. NVIVO 12 and STATA 14 were used for qualitative and quantitative data analysis, respectively. RESULTS: Prior to the intervention, the level of awareness about FGS among health workers was less than 8%, and most participants only understood FGS as merely urogenital schistosomiasis in females. In response to this gap, an FGS education intervention in the form of training of health workers, student nurses alongside the distribution of FGS educational materials were carried out. The intervention enhanced health workers' awareness of FGS to more than 61%, encompassing an enhanced understanding of the disease's signs and symptoms to more than 60%, as well as its management strategies. However, access to praziquantel, the primary treatment, remained a significant challenge. CONCLUSIONS: The FGS intervention effectively raised healthcare workers' awareness and knowledge. Expanding training and improving praziquantel access are essential for optimal FGS management. A multi-faceted approach involving individuals, communities, and the healthcare system is necessary for comprehensive FGS prevention and control.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".