Community health workers (CHWs) have a key role to play if we are to achieve our ambitious goals to reduce child and maternal mortality globally. A wide diversity of CHW cadres have been established in many countries, both in the public sector and with nongovernmental organizations, yet several major challenges have emerged. Mobile phones can be transformative for community … [Read more...] about Cell phones and CHWs: a transformational marriage?
Scale-up
Program planners’ perspectives of promotora roles, recruitment, and selection.
Program planners work with promotoras (the Spanish term for female community health workers) to reduce health disparities among underserved populations. Based on the Role-Outcomes Linkage Evaluation Model for Community Health Workers (ROLES) conceptual model, we explored how program planners conceptualized the promotora role and the approaches and strategies they used to … [Read more...] about Program planners’ perspectives of promotora roles, recruitment, and selection.
The architecture and effect of participation: a systematic review of community participation for communicable disease control and elimination. Implications for malaria elimination
Community engagement and participation has played a critical role in successful disease control and elimination campaigns in many countries. Despite this, its benefits for malaria control and elimination are yet to be fully realized. This paper reports the findings of an atypical systematic review of 60 years of literature in order to arrive at a more comprehensive awareness of … [Read more...] about The architecture and effect of participation: a systematic review of community participation for communicable disease control and elimination. Implications for malaria elimination
Community health workers and mobile technology: a systematic review of the literature.
In low-resource settings, community health workers are frontline providers who shoulder the health service delivery burden. Increasingly, mobile technologies are developed, tested, and deployed with community health workers to facilitate tasks and improve outcomes. We reviewed the evidence for the use of mobile technology by community health workers to identify opportunities … [Read more...] about Community health workers and mobile technology: a systematic review of the literature.
Transforming the delivery of care in the post-health reform era: what role will community health workers play?
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) affords opportunities to sustain the role of community health workers (CHWs). Among myriad strategies encouraged by PPACA are prevention and care coordination, particularly for chronic diseases, chief drivers of increased health care costs. Prevention and care coordination are functions that have been performed by CHWs for … [Read more...] about Transforming the delivery of care in the post-health reform era: what role will community health workers play?