Job Opportunity for Research Assistant at Sangath in Bhopal

Post: Research Assistant (03 Positions)
Project: AANAND
Required Experience: 2-3 Years
Job Location: Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh
Positions: 01 (Full time)
Joining: Immediate
Duration: 3 years with annual renewal of contract based on annual performance review and availability of the funds.

ABOUT SANGATH

Sangath is a non-governmental, not-for-profit organisation headquartered in Goa, with hubs in New Delhi, Bhopal, and Pune. Sangath in its 25th year of existence, has experience conducting high- quality community-based research in child development, adolescent and youth health, adult mental health, ageing and chronic diseases and addictions as well as the health issues of transgender and disability community. Sangath has won the prestigious MacArthur Foundation International Prize for Creative and Effective Institutions (2008), was recognized as India’s 4th leading public health research institute by Research Councils UK (2015) and won the WHO Public Health Champion Award (2016). You can know more about the organisation on our website ( https://sangath.in/who-we-are/)

About the Project:

AANAND (Addressing ASHA well-beiNg And burnout for improviNg Depression care)

Summary: AANAND will be the first-of-its-kind project in India that will focus on work stress and burnout of rural frontline health workers and develop a pioneering and scalable intervention to improve their well-being through a randomized controlled trial.

Background: Burnout and poor wellbeing are prevalent among rural health workers in India. These health workers are responsible for providing last mile care in various areas such as pregnancy care, vaccinations, child care, as well as basic mental health services. There are more than 1 million female ‘ASHA’ workers at the village-level in India, one of the largest health worker programs in the world. A large group of ASHAs has been recently trained in Madhya Pradesh by Sangath, to deliver the ‘Healthy Activity Program (HAP)’, a brief psychological treatment for individuals with depression. This is critical, because depression is widespread in India but there are scarce numbers of psychiatrists and specialised mental health professionals. To provide effective care in mental health, an ASHA needs to empathize with the client’s beliefs, traditions and ethnicity, or what is called as ‘culturally competent care’. However, an ASHA, who is herself in distress or experiencing burnout and demotivation is less likely to engage with her clients, which can reduce their treatment satisfaction, and thus, the treatment outcomes (e.g., any improvement in depression symptoms).

Objectives

Our proposed intervention is a coaching program for ASHAs based on the use of character strengths grounded in the Indian context, to negotiate stressful work situations and relationships, and improve mental wellbeing. This intervention will be added on to the routine supervision that ASHAs already receive.

We aim to deliver this coaching program to a randomly selected group of ASHAs (or ‘intervention arm’) in Madhya Pradesh, and measure its effectiveness on ASHA wellbeing, compared to another randomly selected group of ASHAs who will receive routine supervision only (or ‘control arm’).

Scope of Work:

• Support the AANAND study investigators to design and develop the trial intervention, which will be a positive-psychology based coaching program for ASHA workers – including residential workshop and remote telephonic coaching

• Supporting literature review for intervention development

• Conducting the activities related to sampling health workers for character-strengths assessment, recruitment (informed consent), conducting the strengths assessment, and supporting data entry and preliminary analysis of data

• Conducting the activities related to planning for field testing/validation of assessment tools, recruitment of study participants (informed consent), conducting field testing/validation of assessment tools, and supporting data entry and preliminary analysis

• Supporting the planning of focus group discussions (FGDs) with health workers, recruitment of study participants (informed consent), moderating the FGDs, compiling field notes & summary of FGDs, transcription, translation of FGDs and qualitative data coding and analysis

• Supporting the documentation of findings of literature review, field testing of tools, strengths assessment and focus group discussions

• Supporting the preparation for intervention development/review workshop and its execution

• Supporting the activities related to intervention development and piloting

• Supporting the pilot testing of the intervention with the study participants, internal review and external/collaborators’ reviews and finalization of the trial intervention

• Conducting consent, data collection and data entry for the intervention pilot study.

• Conducting formal recruitment of ASHAs (informed consent) into the trial

• Conducting the baseline, 1-, 3- and 6-month data collection on outcome assessments (main trial)

• Conducting trial data entry and data cleaning

• Supporting in data analysis and report writing.

• Coordination with all stakeholders and participants for intervention development, review and pilot, including organizing key meetings

• Report writing and documentation related to intervention design, pilot and finalization, trial roll-out including intervention delivery and outcome assessments

Essential requirements

• A Post graduate degree in Public Health, Research Ethics or related Social Sciences

• Expertise in MS Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel)

• Strong verbal and written communication skills including technical and scientific writing

• Prior experience in systematic and narrative literature reviews

• Prior experience in qualitative research methods, data collection and data analysis

• At least 2-3 years of relevant research experience

• Ability to liaise and coordinate with relevant health system stakeholders and project collaborators for the purposes of intervention development, pilot, and implementation.

• This position requires travel to project sites in Madhya Pradesh

• An independent, organized, and proactive team player

Additional requirements

• Prior training in psychology or psychosocial interventions

• Expertise in systematic literature review (preferred)

• Expertise in working with and field data collection with health workers including administering informed consent (preferred)

• Expertise in NVivo for qualitative data analysis

• Expertise in quantitative analysis using SPSS or Stata

• Academic publications in peer reviewed journals (preferred)

Please apply with your CV and cover letter stating your interest and fit for the position, to https://bit.ly/AANAND-RA by November 30th, 2022.

Applications will be shortlisted on rolling basis.

Sangath is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, among other things, or status as a qualified individual with disability.