Tagbilaran City – It’s a wheel a-turning, a never ending process of training and re-training, for the National Nutrition Council Region 7 as the agency goes back to the province of Bohol to provide much needed technical updates for the old and new insights in nutrition program management for the new nutrition program managers.

Having forgone the province for few years in favor of its more nutritionally depressed neighbors in Central Visayas, there has been no participants invited for the annual Nutrition Program Management training from Bohol, until this year when the training itself was brought to the province.

The choice to return to Bohol was beneficial, as there has been a standstill in nutrition program management techniques, especially in the planning aspect, in the province. This was one of the observations noted by the members of the Regional Nutrition Evaluation Team during their recent monitoring and evaluation of local level implementation (MELLPI) in the island.

Stuck in the proverbial box of old but tested nutrition activities, difficulty was found in incorporating new updated programs, projects and activities such as nutrition in emergencies, and interventions that come with other malnutrition problems such as over nutrition, stunting and wasting.

But with fervour only found in people who actually know and care a lot about public health nutrition, this year’s NPM training was as lively as ever, with passionate discussions and the participants’ amounting relief of finally piecing things together.

In the end, the five-day training had been mentally challenging but ultimately fruitful with the thirty three participants being able to put in drafts of three-year LNAPs and with the trainers promising to visit for an outside MELLPI season to further nurture the newly-trained nutrition program managers.//NGS