Community Health Workers

Why We Need Data on Frontline Health Workers

Carol Bales — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 13:58:48 +0000

The lack of data on frontline health workers, particularly community health workers, constrains training, service delivery, and decision-making in global health. To understand better why this data is critical, and what can be done to improve it, mPowering Frontline Health workers and the One Million Health Workers Campaign are conducting a series of interviews to hear from the experts.

This week, we interviewed Dr. Kate Tulenko, Vice President, Health Systems Innovation for IntraHealth International and Director of CapacityPlus, USAID’s flagship health workforce project. Dr. Tulenko previously coordinated the World Bank’s Africa Health Workforce Program and has served on expert panels for the World Health Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Hospital Association, amongst others. Her latest book, Insourced, identifies the links between the US and global health worker shortage and offers affordable solutions. Follow her on twitter at @ktulenko.

Author's name:

Kate Tulenko

Publication Date:

July 2015

Data for Decision-Making Series: Diana Frymus

Sarah Dwyer — Tue, 05 May 2015 13:27:13 +0000

We are joining the One Million Health Workers Campaign in a series of interviews, to hear from the experts why data on community health workers is so critical, and what needs to be done.

This week, we spoke with Diana Frymus, Health Systems Strengthening Advisor in the Office of HIV/AIDS at USAID in Washington, DC. She focuses on strengthening health systems to achieve HIV goals and sustain national HIV programs. Her focal areas of emphasis are on human resources for health, including CHWs, and quality improvement. She is the USAID co-chair of the PEPFAR HRH Technical Working Group and the Health Systems Global Technical Working Group on Supporting and Strengthening the Role of Community Health Workers in Health System Development.

Author's name:

mPowering Frontline Health Workers

Publication Date:

May 2015

Supporting Lifelong Learning among Nigerian Community Health Workers through a Targeted Assessment of Training Needs

Sarah Dwyer — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 18:07:08 +0000

Lifelong learning is the ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated pursuit of knowledge for either personal or professional reasons. It is not confined to the classroom but takes place throughout life and in a range of situations. To develop and maintain the competencies needed to deliver high-quality services, health workers must be lifelong learners. Formal continuing education and training activities can support lifelong learning. Yet to be effective, they must target identified gaps between each worker’s current knowledge and skills and what is actually needed on the job. Training needs assessments provide information to target learning activities toward identified competency gaps and learning needs of specific health workers.

In Nigeria, CapacityPlus collaborated with the Community Health Practitioners Registration Board of Nigeria (CHPRBN) and the Federal Ministry of Health to assess the training needs of community health workers in the South-South region. The assessment focused on globally accepted knowledge, skills, and attitudes for community health practitioners in nine competency domains:

Author's name:

Rebecca Bailey and Joseph Eton

Publication Date:

December 2014

Five Key Steps to Making the Health Workforce a Post-MDG Priority

Carol Bales — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 20:34:14 +0000

This post originally appeared on VITAL, the blog of IntraHealth International.

This is a pivotal year for the international development community.

Fourteen years ago, world leaders gathered at the United Nations headquarters and set eight major goals to reduce extreme poverty and improve lives around the world. Those Millennium Development Goals provided a shared blueprint that unified the global community and accelerated progress like never before. The deadline for the goals is 2015—just around the corner.

The big question now is this: What development goals will we set next? And how can we make even faster progress toward global health and well-being?

Author's name:

Pape Gaye

Publication Date:

April 2014

The Winds of Change

Carol Bales — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 20:18:58 +0000

The Harmattan is a dry and dusty wind that blows right over Nigeria from the Sahara Desert into the Gulf of Guinea. During my recent trip to Abuja, the Harmattan was nearly ending and the dust was beginning to lift its cloud over the city, making way for clear and sunny days. I thought this was a perfect analogy for CapacityPlus’s work supporting preservice education for midwifery and community health workers in the country.

Just outside of Abuja at the School of Midwifery FCT Gwagalada, I had the opportunity to meet with 19 midwifery students, each a beneficiary of a scholarship provided by CapacityPlus to assist with tuition fees for their third and final year of training.

Author's name:

Amanda Puckett

Publication Date:

March 2014

Picturing Our Work: Delivering Over a Thousand Textbooks for Students in Nigeria

Carol Bales — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 15:12:29 +0000

Last month, CapacityPlus delivered much-needed textbooks and other educational materials to 11 schools of health technology and midwifery in Nigeria. Here I am shaking hands with Sampson Tita, the principal of a school of health technology in Nassarawa State. We had just opened boxes and boxes containing brand new books for use by students like these that are studying to become community health extension workers.

Author's name:

Joseph Eton

Publication Date:

January 2014

Mobile Apps to Support Community Health Workers: Adapting Trusted Content to New Mediums

Carol Bales — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 12:54:35 +0000

This post was originally published on the IntraHealth International blog. Lily Walkover and Robin Young describe how Hesperian Health Guides is adapting its trusted sources of health information into open source mobile applications for community health workers.

In developing countries around the world, as many as 50% of people are now using cell phones. Access to cell phones is certainly greater than access to reliable health care and health information! Yet in the emerging field of mHealth—the use of mobile phones to support health—the focus has veered significantly toward data collection. At Hesperian Health Guides (publisher of Where There Is No Doctor), we’ve been part of a conversation to expand that focus and include using mobile phones to deliver health information to community health workers and the people they support.

Health educators all over the world have told us how they have adapted our print resources to their needs. At times this has meant literally cutting up images and text with scissors in order to prepare presentations, handouts, and other materials to provide accessible health information to their communities. This hunger for resources combined with enormous user creativity has motivated us to design mobile apps that not only make health information more accessible, but also facilitate adaptation, feedback, translation, and conversion into new formats for lower-end mobile technologies.

Author's name:

Lily Walkover and Robin Young, guest bloggers

Publication Date:

July 2012

Health Workers’ Role in Health Service Integration

Sarah Dwyer — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 14:32:29 +0000

In the past decade, the global health field has seen a number of interventions that tried to integrate health services for various purposes. Integrating family planning and HIV services have helped countries make use of the resources available for the latter to expand the scope and coverage of services. TB and HIV service integration is another example of synergy to strengthen both programs. The advantage of integration for consumers is clear: patients get comprehensive services, whether in the community or at health facilities.

Focusing on health workers
Through the years, we have learned that it’s vital to strengthen the existing health system as a whole. In integrating health services, these initiatives bring a welcome focus on the key role of health workers who provide services across the system.

Author's name:

Mesrak Belatchew

Publication Date:

July 2011

Community Health Workers: Meeting the Unmet Need for Family Planning in West and Central Africa

jennifer — Tue, 31 May 2011 13:44:43 +0000

A recent New York Times article featured an updated United Nations forecast that projects the world’s population will reach 10.1 billion by the end of the century, rather than stabilizing at nine billion midcentury as previously predicted. In part, these high rates of population growth are fueled by lower than expected declines in fertility in some of the poorer regions of the world—with the slowest fertility declines observed in West and Central Africa.

Behind the data
Demographers and other global health professionals argue that these sustained high rates of fertility and population growth are the result of a weakened commitment to family planning (FP) programs in the last two decades following a significant focus on FP during the 1970s and 1980s.

Author's name:

Sara Pacqué-Margolis and Amanda Puckett

Publication Date:

May 2011

Stepping into the Spotlight: Reflections on Community Health Workers

jennifer — Wed, 25 May 2011 16:21:05 +0000

The focus of community health worker (CHW) discourse seems to have changed, and in my opinion, for the better. Whereas it previously seemed to me that global health conferences and literature focused primarily on training and task-shifting for CHWs, a recent meeting sponsored by the CORE Group—the implementing organization for the USAID Child Survival and Health Network Program—demonstrated that the field is now taking a more comprehensive view, including CHWs as a natural and key part of child survival and maternal and child health discussions.

Applying human resources management to community health workers
Throughout the sessions, the need to consider strategies for managing the development and performance of CHWs as part of a community health system came up repeatedly.

Author's name:

Crystal Ng

Publication Date:

May 2011

Strengthening the Mental Health Workforce with eLearning

jennifer — Tue, 10 May 2011 20:01:45 +0000

Some countries have only one psychiatrist, and as many as half of developing countries have fewer than five mental health researchers. The World Health Organization’s calculations indicate that in low- and middle-income countries more than 239,000 additional mental health workers are needed, but only 54.5% of all low-income countries have specific psychiatric education.

One approach to addressing these shortages is through eLearning.

Academic courses and degrees
There are many institutes and companies throughout the world that offer online degrees and certificates, but the education level, cost, and international recognition varies.

Author's name:

Roos Korste, guest blogger

Publication Date:

May 2011

Model Families to Model Country: Community Workers Help Scale Up Ethiopia’s Health Program

jennifer — Thu, 05 May 2011 17:55:20 +0000

In a typical farmhouse scenario, families live in single-room homes—made of straw, wood, and mud—together with their cattle and other animals. They cook in the same room and do not have latrines or isolated waste disposal facilities. However, Ethiopia’s “model families”—a cornerstone of the country’s successful Health Extension Program (HEP)—build separate kitchens, arrange a place for their cattle outside the family tukul, and dig latrines.

Empowering families with healthy behaviors
Training model families is one of the HEP’s important strategies, and is adapted from Paul Lazarsfeld’s and Everett Rogers’ theories of mass communication and diffusion of innovation.

Author's name:

Mesrak Belatchew

Publication Date:

May 2011

Retaining Community Health Workers in Ethiopia

jennifer — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 17:21:47 +0000

In a recent New York Times opinion, Tina Rosenberg asked “What makes community health care work?” Her commentary highlights the important elements for sustaining community health work in developing countries—careful financing, using teaching as part of the sustainability structure, supervision and training, working with the government, and scaling up according to the program and country context—and refers to the rich experiences of BRAC in Bangladesh.

Ethiopia’s health extension worker (HEW) initiative, established in 2004, is another example of a successful program in sub-Saharan Africa. Developed and implemented by the Federal Ministry of Health in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, the HEW program has evolved both in scope and scale to accommodate new health initiatives.

Author's name:

Mesrak Belatchew

Publication Date:

March 2011

Haiti Prioritizes Human Resources for Health

jennifer — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 15:33:19 +0000

On Wednesday, I attended the Global Health Council Conference plenary session entitled "After the Earthquake: Towards Building a New Haitian Health System”, in which the Haitian Minister of Health, the Honorable Dr. Alex Larsen, discussed Haiti’s number one health priority—building the country’s human resources for health.

Dr. Larsen and partners of the Haitian Ministry of Health conveyed the futility of developing infrastructure and obtaining commodities without simultaneously bolstering the health care workforce. He mentioned three cadres of health workers that are currently in particularly high demand: community health workers, midwives, and nurse anesthesiologists.

Author's name:

Sara Pacqué-Margolis

Publication Date:

June 2010 (All day)

Global Health Workforce News of Interest

Sarah Dwyer — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 19:34:35 +0000

Here are five articles I found particularly interesting this week:

Effect of Peer Health Workers on AIDS Care in Rakai, Uganda
This article in the PloS ONE journal reports on the findings of “a cluster randomized trial to assess the effect of community-based peer health workers (PHW) on AIDS care of adults in Rakai, Uganda.” The authors conclude that “PHWs may be an effective intervention to sustain long-term ART in low-resource settings.”

Over 2,000 Health Workers Get Free Phones
The New Times (Rwanda) reports that community health workers in Karongi District “will get free mobile phones as part of government’s efforts to boost the health sector through the use of science and technology.” The phones “are part of an ongoing countrywide campaign to ensure efficient and timely submission of monthly medical reports to the Ministry of Health.”

Author's name:

Sarah L. Dwyer

Publication Date:

June 2010 (All day)