A study to compare work profile of Rural and UrbanAnganwadi Workers in Bangalore.

Abstract

Background Anganawadi Centre AWC is a point of contact to deliver supplementary nutrition to many beneficiaries such as Antenatal postnatal mothers and Under 6 year children at grass root level in the community. Smooth delivery of services depends on education experience locality and training of Anganawadi workersAWW which in turn affect nutritional status of beneficiaries.Objective This study was planned to compare the work profile of Anganawadi workers of urban and rural Bangalore.Methodology All 30 AWW are included for the study. 10 AWW are from urban and 20 are from one of the rural practice areas of Department of Community Medicine Bangalore Medical college and Research Institute Bangalore was included. This study employed interviewing AWW with pretested semi-structured questionnaire for data collection after obtaining written informed consent from the participants. The data collected was entered in MS excel 2016 and analysed using SPSS software version 23.0.Results 90 of Rural AWWs had completed 10 years of service compared tourban AWWrsquos 50. 90 of AWW in Urban ICDS centres stayed in same locality while 60 of AWW in Rural ICDS centres were from distant localityp0.01. Mean time Anganawadi centres remained open in rural was 4.75hours and urban was 4hoursp0.004. Mean time spent on Serving and feeding of supplementary nutrition to 3 to lt6years old children in rural AWC is 28.5min and urban AWC is 11.8minp0.05.Conclusion AWW should be recruited based on Merit and they should be relocated to their own areas of residences to avoid problems of travelling. The existing training of AWWs to be evaluated and their continuous education should be strengthened to enhance the services.nbsp