Authors: Laura D Sander, David Holtzman, Mark Pauly and Jennifer Cohn
Sub-Saharan Africa faces a severe health worker shortage, which community health workers (CHWs) may fill. Task shifting – the reassignment of clinical roles by transferring suitable tasks from higher- to lower-skilled healthcare workers (HCWs) – is one of the strategies proposed to mitigate the effects of the HCW shortage. Community health workers (CHWs) are a unique cadre of HCWs and are well suited to help address the HCW gap.
Kenya’s 2006 Community Strategy (CS) outlines primary health care delivery at the community unit (CU). CUs comprise volunteer CHWs who are linked to the primary health facility through trained Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWs) employed in primary care facilities; each CHEW is meant to supervise 25 CHWs.
As Kenya works toward its One Million Community Health Workers Campaign to standardize CUs, it is important to detail tasks that volunteer CHWs perform. In addition, no studies have looked at the actual time savings realized by task shifting from higher HCW cadres to CHWs. This information is needed to inform implementation of task shifting and help developing country governments, donors and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) better understand the value of CHWs. This mixed-methods study in Kenya was conducted to fill this knowledge gap.This study describes tasks shifted from clinicians to CHWs in Kenya, places monetary valuations on CHWs’ efforts, and models effects of further task shifting on time demands of clinicians and CHWs.
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Resource Topic: CHW Role, Community Health Workers/Volunteers, Human Resources Management/Workforce Development, Recognition/remuneration, Task shifting
Resource Type: Research
Year: 2015
Region: Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)
Country: Kenya
Publisher May Restrict Access: No