Association of Volunteer Communication Mobilizers’ Polio-Related Knowledge and Job-Related Characteristics With Health Message Delivery Performance in Kano District of Nigeria

Abstract

Volunteer communication mobilizers (VCMs) were deployed in Nigeria to increase community awareness for polio vaccination. To understand whether VCMs’ knowledge and job-related characteristics were associated with performance, we conducted a cross-sectional survey in the Nassarawa and Ungogo Local Governance Areas (LGAs). We asked VCMs about the consequences of polio, preventive strategies, and health communication messages to assess knowledge. We considered VCMs’ performance satisfactory if they delivered more messages during their last visit, and knew the number of <5 children and neonates in their settlement. We used t-tests to compare continuous and chi-square tests for categorical variables, and ran linear and ordinal logistic regression to understand if knowledge and job-related characteristics were associated with performance. Of the VCMs, 69% (118/170) were enrolled from Ungogo. We found that 63% of VCMs in Nassarawa had appropriate levels of knowledge about health education messages, compared to 26.3% in Ungogo (p < .001). We also found that 32.7% of VCMs in Nassrawa and 15.3% of VCMs in Ungogo mentioned that polio vaccination protects children from paralysis (p = .040). Among VCMs, 75% in Nassrawa and 31% in Ungogo knew the total number of <5 children in their catchment area of work (p = .001). We identified that for every 10 additional months of experience, VCMs delivered 1.3 more messages during household visits (95% confidence interval, 0.56–1.9, p = .001). VCMs who knew that polio cause paralysis delivered 0.5 more health messages than VCMs who did not have that knowledge (95% confidence interval, 0.08–2.3, p = .018). Our results demonstrated VCMs’ polio-related knowledge was associated with health message delivery performance.