Even when health care providers in rural India know the right treatment for childhood diarrhea and pneumonia, they rarely prescribe them correctly, according to a new study.
Medical practitioners typically fail to prescribe lifesaving treatments such as oral rehydration salts (ORS). Instead, they typically prescribe unnecessary antibiotics or other potentially harmful drugs, says Manoj Mohanan, a professor in Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, and lead author of the study in JAMA Pediatrics.
Diarrhea and pneumonia accounted for 24 percent of deaths among children 1 to 4 years old, totaling approximately 2 million deaths worldwide in 2011. Bihar, India—where the study was conducted—has an infant mortality rate of 55 per 1,000 live births, the highest in the country.
“We know from previous studies that providers in rural settings have little medical training and their knowledge of how to treat these two common and deadly ailments is low,” Mohanan says.
“Eighty percent in our study had no medical degree. But much of India’s rural population receives care from such untrained providers, and very few studies have been able to rigorously measure the gap between what providers know and what they do in practice.”
The ‘Know-Do’ Gap
The study involved 340 health care providers. Researchers conducted “vignette” interviews with providers to assess how they would diagnose and treat a hypothetical case.
Later, standardized patients—individuals who portrayed patients presenting the same symptoms as in the interviews—made unannounced visits. This strategy enabled researchers to measure the gap between what providers know and what they actually do—the “know-do” gap.
Providers exhibited low levels of knowledge about both diarrhea and pneumonia during the interviews and performed even worse in practice.
For example, for diarrhea, 72 percent of providers reported they would prescribe oral rehydration salts—a life-saving, low-cost, and readily available intervention—but only 17 percent actually did so. Those who did prescribe ORS also added other unnecessary or harmful drugs.
In practice, none of the providers gave the correct treatment: only ORS, with or without zinc, and no other potentially harmful drugs. Instead, almost 72 percent of providers gave antibiotics or potentially harmful treatments without ORS.
Extra Antibiotics
“Massive over-prescription of antibiotics is a major contributor to rising antibiotic resistance worldwide,” Mohanan says. “Our ongoing studies aim to understand why providers who know they shouldn’t be prescribing antibiotics for conditions like simple diarrhea continue to do so.
