Data from: Improving patient-centred counselling skills among lay healthcare workers in South Africa using the Thusa-Thuso motivational interviewing training and support program

We developed a motivational Interviewing (MI) counselling training and support program for lay counsellors in South Africa – branded "Thusa-Thuso - helping you help", commonly referred to as Thusa-Thuso. We conducted a pilot study in South Africa to assess the impact of the Thusa-Thuso program for lay counsellors. We aimed to determine its effect on MI technical skills and explore the feasibility of a training-of-trainers (TOT) scale-up strategy among non-governmental (NGO) partners in the HIV treatment program. Adult (≥ 18 years) lay counsellors from ten primary healthcare clinics in Johannesburg participated in the program, attending the ten-day baseline training and quarterly refresher sessions over 12 months. With lay counsellors' and patients' written informed consent, audio recordings of counselling sessions were collected and reviewed using the MI treatment integrity (MITI) coding system to evaluate technical (cultivating change talk and softening sustain talk) and relational (empathy and partnership) competency scores before and after training. Following 12 months of providing support to pilot training participating lay counsellors, we were requested to expand the training to NGO partner team trainers through a one-time five-day Training of Trainers (TOT) format. This involved 127 trainees from November 2020 to January 2021. We report on the TOT training experiences based on focus group discussions with 42 participants conducted six months after the TOT sessions.