Developing a Basic Package of Oral Care Training Program for Primary Health Care Nurses.

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Nursing Education
• Primary Health Care

Background:

• Nurses are crucial for delivering oral care within primary health care.
• Existing oral health training for nurses lacks established scope and methods.
• Mentorship as a training approach for oral health is underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a basic oral health care training package for Kenyan primary health care nurses.
• To evaluate and compare workshop versus mentorship training approaches on outcomes.

Main Methods:

• The ADDIE instructional model and scoping review informed training development.
• A quasi-experimental design compared a 1-year mentorship program against a workshop-only group.
• The Kirkpatrick framework was used for evaluation.

Main Results:

• A 7-area, 37-subtopic training package was developed and evaluated.
• Nurses showed improved knowledge (47.9%–64.7%), confidence (77.3%–92.2%), and service delivery (0.3%–35.8%).
• The mentorship group demonstrated superior outcomes in confidence, service delivery, and parental child oral health practices, with less knowledge decay.

Conclusions:

• The developed oral health care training program was successfully implemented and evaluated.
• Mentorship yielded significantly better results than the workshop-only approach across all evaluated outcomes.
• Mentorship should be an integral part of basic oral care training for enhanced effectiveness.