An interventional study to compare the effect of teaching on lecture method and the use of educational package on the knowledge and performance of health care providers

Background: Health care providers are considered as a group of primary health service workers increasing their scientific and practical ability. Providing an effective and desirable teaching is one of the main ways to improve the quality of services; however, this will be possible by selecting an appropriate training method. Therefore, the goal of this study was to determine the effect of teaching the principles of caring for pregnant mothers on knowledge and health care providers’ performance with onsite and nonattendance methods. Methods: This study was conducted as an interventional and semiexperimental study in 20172018. Sixty four health care providers were enrolled in Mashhad’s health center. They were randomly divided into two groups of 32. For the nonattendance group, the educational package contents were prepared in the form of PowerPoint slides consisting texts and images. For the onsite teaching group, the participants were taught in lecture for six hours. The amount of knowledge of health care providers was assessed before and after training by using a written test questionnaire and their performance at work was controlled by a checklist Results: By comparing the scores before and after the educational intervention, the difference in mean scores in the onsite group was 4.50 ± 0.334 and in the nonattending group was 3.77 ± 0.332. This difference in the values in each group was significant. The difference between the mean posttest scores in the two groups was 0.70 ± 0. 463. The difference in the mean of functional scores with two types of training was determined 17.1 ± 0.246, and no significant difference was found for the groups (p = 0.496). Conclusion: In this study, the increase in the level of health care information was acceptable. Both methods had the same effect in the cognitive and functional domain. Therefore, the method of using the educational package can be a good alternative to the lecture method.