ABSTRACT
Day care centres and kindergartens have potential effects on children's physical, social and mental developments. The present study was carried out to assess the knowledge and skills of nurseries' staff in Alexandria as regard child mental health, and to evaluate the outcome of an in-service child mental health training programme. For this purpose 10% of the registered nurseries in Alexandria were selected by the stratified random sampling technique using proportional allocation [n=54] to represent the six districts of Alexandria. Data were collected from all staff members of selected nurseries present during the visits to the nurseries [n=172]. A self-administered questionnaire was used and including general information about the respondents, and their knowledge and skills regarding child mental health. From the total sample, 52 were randomly selected to attend a 2-day in-service mental health training programme. Results of the study revealed deficiency of knowledge and skills of the staff in most of the tested items. However staff who were graduates of Faculties of Kindergarten, Education and Arts were significantly better than other educational categories regarding the number of correct or partially correct answers. The training programme proved to cause a significant improvement in knowledge and skills of the staff in most of the items. It was recommended to increase the staff who have educational background of kindergarten and education, to give more attention to continuous evaluation of nurseries staff knowledge and skills, and to apply a maintained system of pre and in-service child mental health training programmes for them