Is “Mothers’ self Reporting” as good as “community health

volunteers’ reported data” for childhood diarrhoea?

Childhood diarrhea remains a leading cause of morbidity and

mortality among under five children globally

Challenges in measuring childhood diarrhoea Periodicity of data collection Recall bias Logistical burden

484 households were followed by CHVs for 4 weeks to collect diarrheal data as defined by WHO.

In 245 households, mothers were trained to capture diarrheal episodes for four weeks in a predefined format

Data collection

January 18

th to February 15

th, 2016 in 10 villages in Sitarganj block, district Udham Singh

Nagar, Uttarakhand, India.

Conclusion The paired t tests for means was used to compare mean incidence and LP from both the sources using Microsoft

excel.

The results show that in CHV reported data, in 4 weeks’ time, out of 634 children followed, 95 diarrhea cases were

found with 271 diarrheal days.

In self-reporting data by mothers, out of 295 children followed, 51 diarrheal cases were found in 4 weeks’ time

with 109 diarrheal days.

The incidence and LP were 6.18 and 1.53 respectively in CHV reported data and 7.41and 1.33 in mothers reported

data respectively.

No statistically significant difference was found in incidence and LP calculated from CHV reported data set

and mothers reported data set.

Self-reporting of diarrheal data by mothers may be considered for measuring diarrheal diseases in programmatic

settings

- Farhad Ali, Abhik Dutta, Neeti Sharma, Arindam Ghatak, Mahendra Upadhyay, Santanu Chakraborty,