Scale-up

In 2010, Zambia created a cadre of community health workers called Community Health Assistants (CHAs).  This program continues to be scaled up to meet the needs of Zambia’s rural population.  This study summarizes the factors that have aided the scale-up of the CHA program as well as the challenges.  The study determined that CHAs play a critical role in providing a wide range of services to community members.  However, CHAs continue to face challenges such as infrequent supervision, lack of medical and non-medical supplies, and challenges with the mobile data reporting system.  The study c

This report is the first National Community Health Strategy Malawi has produced, spanning from 2017 to 2022.  This strategy is intended to work towards achieving Millennium Development Goal number three: universal health care.  The main focus of this strategy include: integration of health services, community engagement, and sufficient and equitable distribution of well-trained community health workforce.  Efforts will also support maintaining sufficient supplies, transportation, and infrastructure.  This strategy provides a guide and framework to introduce community health into the pre-exi

To achieve universal health coverage, health systems will have to reach into every community, including the poorest and hardest to access. Since Alma-Ata, inconsistent support of community health workers (CHWs) and failure to integrate them into the health system have impeded full realization of their potential contribution in the context of primary health care.

This brief describes the key outcomes of a meeting held by mPowering and partners to discuss stronger cross-sector collaboration between health and ICT authorities in order to reach national scale in digital health to improve service delivery and health outcomes.

This presentation recaps a meeting held by mPowering and partners to discuss stronger cross-sector collaboration between health and ICT authorities in order to reach national scale in digital health to improve service delivery and health outcomes.

The integration of community health workers (CHWs) into primary and secondary prevention functions in health programs and services delivery in Mexico and South Africa has been demonstrated to be effective. This paper aims to identify barriers and challenges to these types of CHW programs by comparing the experiences of earlier studies with successful programs. Barriers reviewed include scale up issues, training and certification issues, integration issues, and funding gaps. The authors use this information to make policy recommendations about task-sharing CHW programs. 

This paper briefly summarizes definitions, approaches, and challenges to achieving “scale” in community-focused health programs as discussed at the 2005 CORE spring meeting and the USAID child survival and health grants program mini-university. This paper is meant to harmonize a vocabulary for use by NGOs and their partners as they further discuss, debate, and analyze how NGOs and their partners can reach more people with high quality maternal, child and neonatal health interventions. 

The Ebola virus outbreak in 2013 revealed that health delivery systems in western Africa were not well-equipped to handle such epidemics. This paper argues that robust community health worker programs should be implemented as a strategy for improving global health responses to disasters such as the Ebola outbreak. Because CHWs have built strong relationships with the communities they serve, they are able to navigate many of the cultural and societal factors that resulted in Ebola's persistence.

Pathfinder International Ethiopia has extensive experience implementing family planning (FP)/HIV integration through public health centers (HCs) and community networks. This brief describes Pathfinder's approach and its evolution and scale-up over time. It presents their experience in relation to the recommendations of World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines on FP/HIV integration and also outlines next steps and recommendations

Although Côte d’Ivoire has seen an overall downward trend in HIV prevalence rates over the past decade thanks to more robust and effective HIV/AIDS prevention programming, over 50 percent of adults and children who are HIV-positive have yet to receive antiretroviral therapy, according to UNAIDS estimates. Inadequate numbers of health workers, as well as their uneven distribution throughout the country, are significant barriers to the scale-up of HIV treatment.