Community participation in rural health care facility services in Kakuyuni Health Centre, Machakos County

Abstract

Background: Community participation is the collective involvement of local people in assessing and identifying their needs, implementing and evaluating health programs. Community projects project have various phases, assessment, planning, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation phase. Community members should be involved in all phases to own the projects. This study sought to establish the level of community participation in Kangundo Sub-county in rural health care facility services, in Machakos County, Kenya.
Methods: Analytical cross-sectional study design was used for this study. 384 respondents from Kakuyuni Location were involved in the study. Structured interviewer administered questionnaire
Results: The study found out that most of the community members (n=278, 72.4%) were not involved in any stage of development in community project development cycle in rural health care facility services. As per the results 106 respondents had participated in various stages of project development cycle. Again, 15.4%, (n=59) of the respondents were involved in needs assessment, 9.4% (n=36) at implementation stage. 1.6% (n=6) at monitoring and evaluation, and 1.3% (n=5) were involved in all the stages of development cycle. However, most 72.4%, (n=278) of the respondents were not involved at any stage of development. Some factors were significantly affecting community participation; being a county committee member, length of stay in the community and having attended an NGO meeting and community mobilization. Several challenges affected community participation.
Conclusion: Kakuyuni community members are less involved in rural health care facility projects, whereby the results revealed that only 27.6% of the interviewed population was involved.