Table 3.
Views and recommendations of ASHAs about the training
| Training outcomes | |
| “Before I felt shy to talk, but now I’m more confident …” “It brought more interest to work” “Now it’s easy to motivate people” “I didn’t know much before training, after training I learnt lot of things … now I can give advice and help others” “It helped a lot; we learnt something new about health …. I learnt about blood pressure and how to control it” “The community members respect us because we are taking care of their health” “Our trainers taught us how to explain to people in understandable way and how to take decisions” | |
| Training material | |
| “Even though we explain things to them, it’s hard to get them to understand …. by seeing flip charts and images they can understand easily” “I went home and taught my family members” “It helped a lot, now I can check all the blood pressure of my family members, I’m more experienced and advise them to eat good food and exercise daily” | |
| Community experience and recommendations | |
| “People smile when they see us and keep telling us that they learnt a lot of things from us and they are taking good care of themselves now and doing more exercise. When we hear these words, we know they are interested to listen to us…. we get satisfied” “We should conduct meetings for young people so that they learn to take care of their heath” “They usually follow our advice, but soon they will forget. It’s better if we can set up scheduled visits to keep reminding them” “It will be good if you increase training period and should do more training on other health issues” “It is a very good program; it would be better to continue for 3 months we can learn more things” | |
| Challenges and difficulties | |
| “I have been working as an ASHA for 10 years, but my family is not happy with my job due to insufficient pay, they want me to quit” “Sometimes it takes us up to 5 months to receive our pay” “Some ASHAs went on strike but were told by our supervisors, that you will never get a fixed salary only incentives” “Housewives and farmers are busy, they don’t have time to come to the meetings” |