Effectiveness of a Capacity-Building Program for Village Health Volunteers in Screening Nutritional Status among Community-Dwelling Older Adults

Abstract

This quasi-experimental study employed a two-group pretest-posttest design to compare the mean knowledge and skill scores of village health volunteers (VHVs) in screening the nutritional status of older adults before and after the intervention, and to compare the differences in mean scores between the experimental and control groups. The sample consisted of 84 VHVs selected using cluster sampling and equally allocated to an experimental group and a control group, with 42 participants in each group. The capacity-building program emphasized practice-based learning and comprised a workshop, demonstrations, simulated practice scenarios, and implementation in the community setting. The research instruments were validated by experts, yielding item-objective congruence (IOC) values ranging from .67 to 1.00. Reliability coefficients were .72 using the Kuder–Richardson formula and .89 using Cronbach’s alpha. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, the paired-samples T-Test, and the independent-samples T-Test. The findings are as follows.
1. After participating in the program, the experimental group’s mean knowledge score increased from 7.60 (SD = 1.20) to 13.50 (SD = 1.80), while the mean skill score increased from 31.43 (SD = 9.64) to 45.29 (SD = 3.55), with both increases statistically significant at the .001 level.
2. Following the intervention, the experimental group demonstrated significantly greater improvements in knowledge and skills than the control group at the .001 level. The mean difference in knowledge scores was 5.86 in the experimental group compared with 0.86 in the control group, while the mean difference in skill scores was 13.86 in the experimental group compared with 0.71 in the control group.

The results highlight the need for public health agencies to integrate community-based nutritional assessment tools for older adults, such as the Elderly-MNA–TL traffic-light criteria, into primary care services to establish proactive surveillance systems. Furthermore, capacity-building for VHVs should be promoted through active learning approaches emphasizing demonstration and simulated practice, thereby fostering sustainable expertise in screening and managing older adults’ health data within the community.