Th role of counselling to reduce parental fears and anxiety about newborn screening for sickle cell disease in Northern Ghana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: In Ghana, about 15,000 newborn children are diagnosed to have sickle cell disease (SCD) annually. Previous studies have demonstrated that while neonatal screening coupled with early intervention reduces SCD-related morbidity and mortality, only 50-70% of screened-positive children have been successfully followed-up to receive healthcare. Gazelle point-of-care testing (POCT) device with high specificity and sensitivity may be more easily integrated into existing immunization programs in rural settings, to improve follow-up rates. This study explored views of community members and healthcare workers about the role of counselling to reduce parental fears and anxiety about newborn screening for SCD in rural Northern Ghana. METHODS: This study used qualitative research approach where 16 focus group discussions and 19 in-depth interviews were conducted with participants between April and June 2022. Purposive sampling technique was used to select participants for the interviews. The interviews were recorded with consent of participants, transcribed and coded into themes using QSR Nvivo 12 software before thematic analysis. RESULTS: Participants saw the need for counselling services to be provided to participants in the planned SCD screening program. They believed that effective counselling could help parents take appropriate strategies to manage children diagnosed with SCD and improve their health status. Furthermore, healthcare workers, mothers and opinion leaders held that counsellors could offer words of encouragement to parents to reduce their anxiety and fears during the screening especially, those whose children could be tested positive. They however suggested various strategies such as adequate training and positive behaviour of counsellors to ensure effective counselling process during the SCD screening program. CONCLUSION: Although counselling has been described as a key component in the planned SCD screening program, adequate training to improve knowledge, counselling skills as well as positive attitude of counsellors towards parents could enhance the effectiveness of counselling services offered.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".