Teachers' Training and Involvement in School Health Programme in Oyo State, Southwest Nigeria.

School Health Programme (SHP) currently lacks effective implementation in Nigeria. Lack of training/orientation of teachers in the programme may have contributed to this. Developing an appropriate training intervention may require prior situation analysis to know teachers' current level of training and involvement in the programme, as there is paucity of information on such study in Oyo State. Thus, this study was carried out to assess primary school teachers' training and involvement in the SHP in Oyo state, Nigeria. A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted using a 2-stage cluster sampling method to select 2 out of the 33 Local Government Areas (LGAs) in Oyo State. A semi-structured self-administered questionnaire was used to obtain information on respondents' characteristics and previous training and involvement in the SHP. The major variable for assessing teachers' involvement in the SHP was "ever been involved in health inspection of pupils". Level of involvement was categorized into "never, "once", "occasionally", "frequently", and "very regularly". These options were further re-categorized into "never", "infrequently" (once and occasionally) and "frequently" (frequently and very regularly) for the purpose of inferential statistics. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and Chi-square test at p=0.05. A total of 811 respondents participated in the study. Twenty-eight percent of the respondents reported previous training in the SHP out of whom 44.7% received the training on-the-job. Forty-seven percent were regularly involved in health inspection of pupils. Teachers who taught health education (92.3%) were involved in health inspection of pupils compared with counterparts who did not (74.4%) (p<0.001). Similarly, 85.3% of teachers trained on-the-job were frequently involved in the SHP compared with 73.6% of those trained during undergraduate years (p=0.026). Training and involvement of public primary school teachers in the SHP in Oyo State were suboptimal. Efforts at building the capacity of teachers through on-the-job training in SHP may be necessary to improving the current level of implementation in the State.