Training for Primary Health Care Practitioners

Abstract

This chapter describes in detail the training course for primary health care practitioners (PHCPs) designed for the needs of the EEP project, aiming to promote parent-infant interaction and to ensure that resources are targeted to those families in need of more support. The course is based on the principles of adult learning models and uses a partnership approach to the helping process, combining the Parent Adviser model, promotional interviewing from the EU/WHO project and the theory and skills of assessing and supporting early parent-infant interaction and the psychosocial development of infants. This chapter provides a step-by-step exposition of how to train PHCPs, stressing the importance of the helper-parent relationship and ways of facilitating parent-child communication. It gives an analytic description of the course content (see also Appendix) and the methods of training. It describes in detail the supervision which followed the training and accompanied the PHCPs throughout the implementation phase, elaborating on the supervisory relationship and the alliance necessary for the supervision to be effective. It finishes with some concluding remarks about the training and the supervision, and their role in the project.