Community Health Workers

This review evaluated the effects of a home- or community-based program for treating malaria in a malaria endemic setting through interventions involving training community health workers or mothers. [adapted from author]

This article describes the rationale for the UK to learn from Brazil’s scaled-up Community Health Worker primary care strategy, starting with a pilot project in North Wales. [from abstract]

In Pakistan, where gendered norms restrict women’s mobility, female community health workers (CHWs) provide doorstep primary health services to home-bound women. This study aims to understand how these cultural norms affect CHWs’ home-visit rates and the quality of services delivered. [from abstract]

This toolkit contains resources to help policy makers, program managers, service providers, and other audiences improve access to and quality of community-based family planning services. [from publisher]

In this 7 minute video, UNICEF reports on a programme to train community health workers to provide life-saving services in the hardest-to-reach places in Niger. [adapted from publisher]

This 7 minute video presents the issues of HRH in Mali and a program to train community health workers to provide life-saving services in the hardest-to-reach places in Mali. [adapted from publisher]

This artical reports the clinical and programatic outcomes at 24 months for a cohort of patients enrolled in a community-based anti-retroviral treatment (ART) program in southeastern Rwanda which provided additional measures of support at the community level, including community-based psychosocial support and directly observed ART delivered by community health workers. [adapted from author]

The principles outlined in this document are intended as a framework for advocacy, programming and partnership between implementing NGOs, government and donor agencies working with key community health worker (CHW) cadres in countries for which rapid and urgent scale-up of CHW programs is a priority.

This paper provides cost guidance for one adaptable configuration of a community health worker subsystem: a provider system housed within a larger primary-health-care system that includes clinics and referral hospitals. Costing is done by function and by local epidemiologic characteristics so that components and assumptions can be easily modified. [adapted from introduction]

This study sought to further the evidence on how socio-demographic factors influence community health worker effectiveness in conducting home visits in order to ensure the adoption of evidence based maternal, newborn, child health and nutrition best practices and to increase demand for facility based services, including skilled birth attendance. [adapted from author]

Volunteers in Taiwan complement the delivery of health services by paid health professionals. This paper explores the burdens associated with their activities and the degree to which they are experienced. [adapted from abstract]

This article examines three South African community health worker programs, a small local non-governmental organisation, a local satellite of a national NGO, and a government-initiated service, that provide a range of services from home-based care, childcare, and health promotion to assist clients in overcoming poverty-related barriers to health care to identify factors that constrain and enable outreach services to improve access to care. [from abstract]

Using a rapid assessment, this study examines the outcomes of a pilot community health worker program to improve the management of hypertension and diabetes in Gauteng province, South Africa. [from abstract]

This program management unit explores some of the key components and lessons learned from designing and implementing community health worker programs within national primary healthcare
systems. [adapted from author]

This paper applies a health systems perspective to guide analysis of potential challenges of scaling up mHealth for the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of community-based health services (CBS) in South Africa. This formalisation of CBS is expected to bring greater standardisation of M&E and supervision systems for community health workers. [adapted from author]

This study was collected data from caregivers who work directly with vulnerable children to explore how care decisions are made by community-based volunteers, and the utility of the Child Status Index at the community level as a job aid. [adapted from summary]

This paper describes the history of how an experimental study set the stage for a national program for promoting community-based primary health care—the Community-Based Health Planning and Services initiative, which deployed nurses to the community and engaged local leaders, reducing child mortality and fertility substantially. [adapted from author]

This controlled study aimed to assess the effectiveness of a personalized HIV risk-reduction intervention delivered by community health workers to people who know they have HIV and who are not on treatment. [from author]

The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of a referral system - where community health workers (CHW) were trained to refer babies with illnesses or identified danger signs - by describing CHW referral completion rates as well as mothers’ health-care seeking practices. [adapted from author]

This paper presents the results of a mixed-methods assessment of selected health systems supports for community-based health workers in a national community case management program for childhood illness in Malawi during the first year of implementation. [adapted from abstract]

The purpose of this review is to assess the effectiveness of community health worker programs, with particular emphasis on how they have or how they might assist countries in achieving the health-related MDGs.[from author]

The aim of this article was to conduct a thematic review of how mHealth projects have approached the intersection of mobile technology and public health in low- and middle-income countries and identify the promising practices and experiences learned, as well as novel and innovative approaches of how mHealth can support community health workers. [adapted from abstract]

The objective of this study was to determine if, with appropriate training, volunteers known as community-based reproductive health agents can administer injectable contraceptives to women in a rural region of Ethiopia with the same effectiveness, safety and acceptability as health extension workers. [from author]

This guide contains detailed guidance on how to train safe motherhood action group volunteers in two key areas of their portfolio – maternal and newborn health care.

This study investigated the knowledge and performance of health extension workers (HEWs) on antenatal and delivery care. The study also explored the barriers and facilitators for HEWs in the provision of maternal health care. [from abstract]

Ethiopia has been deploying specially trained cadres of community based health workers named health extension workers. This study investigates the role of these these community health workers in improving utilization of maternal health services. [adapted from abstract]

This study examined the performance motivation of community health workers and its determinants on India’s Accredited Social Health Activist program. [from abstract]

In Senegal, an pilot study demonstrated the feasibility of a malaria treatment program in remote villages by volunteer home care providers. This paper reports the results of the scale-up in the targeted communities and the impact of the strategy on malaria in the formal health sector. [adapted from abstract]

This article presents policy-makers and programme managers with key considerations for a model to improve the work environment as an important approach to increase community health worker productivity and, ultimately, the effectiveness of community-based strategies. [from abstract]

To address its high maternal mortality rate, in particular the inequities in access to maternal health care services, the government of Pakistan created a new cadre of community-based midwives. This study is designed to address a critical gap in our knowledge about whether this cadre of workers, operating in the private health care context, will meet the expectation to provide care to the poorest and most marginalized women. [adapted from author]