Despite their fast paced growth and increasing utilization, there is still a lack of community health worker (CHW) training programs, certification and credentialing by state agencies. CHW views and inputs on their roles are also lacking in policy development and in the literature. This book seeks to fill this gap by publishing CHW-authored reports from the field; it informs … [Read more...] about Promoting the Health of the Community: Community Health Workers Describing Their Roles, Competencies, and Practice
Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)
Promoting Gender Responsive Policies and Programmes for Community Health Workers: a Gender Analysis Framework
Informal occupational roles with the lowest pay and the least power have been dominated by women. Recent findings from Afghanistan showed that male CHWs were praised for their volunteer work while female CHWs doing similar work were not praised as their efforts were viewed “expected” (Najafizada et al. 2019). COVID-19 has further highlighted the gendered nature of the … [Read more...] about Promoting Gender Responsive Policies and Programmes for Community Health Workers: a Gender Analysis Framework
Community-Based Interventions to Reduce Child Stunting in Rural Guatemala: A Quality Improvement Model
Despite efforts to increase access to evidence-based nutrition interventions, cases of chronic child malnutrition (stunting) in rural Guatemala are among the highest in the world. The writers of this study examine a community-based quality improvement intervention in a region with a high rate of stunting. The addition of structured performance visualization, audit and feedback … [Read more...] about Community-Based Interventions to Reduce Child Stunting in Rural Guatemala: A Quality Improvement Model
Community health workers’ attitudes, practices and perceptions towards the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazilian low-income communities
Community Health Workers (CHW) are a category of social workers described in many countries’ health systems as responsible for engaging people in their residences and communities, and other non-clinical spaces to enable access to health services, especially in low-income areas. The pandemic imposes unexpected challenges on the usual modes of interaction of public health … [Read more...] about Community health workers’ attitudes, practices and perceptions towards the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazilian low-income communities
A Cluster-Randomized Trial to Test Sharing Histories as a Training Method for Community Health Workers in Peru
Community health workers (CHWs) are increasingly deployed to support adoption of healthy home practices in low- and middle-income countries. However, little is known about how best to train them for the capabilities and cultural competencies needed to support maternal health behavior change. The authors of this article tested a CHW training method, Sharing Histories (SH), in … [Read more...] about A Cluster-Randomized Trial to Test Sharing Histories as a Training Method for Community Health Workers in Peru