Community Interventions

This study aimed to identify determinants of caregivers’ use of village malaria workers services for childhood illness and caregivers’ knowledge of malaria management. [adapted from abstract]

High levels of unmet need for family planning and high contraceptive discontinuation rates persist in Jordan, prompting the initiation a client-centered family planning service program with community-based activities to encourage women with unmet need to visit health centers, which was evaluated in this study. [adapted from abstract]

This presentation outlines the methodology, aims and results of a highly successful and innovative program of pre-service health education at Lurio University that links future health professionals with the community by assigning each student to a family. The student monitors the family’s health status and analyzes the social, economic and cultural aspects impacting on the individuals’s and family health such as education and nutrition.

The Ministry of Health in Zambia developed a strategy to integrate community health workers into national health plans by creating a new group of community health assistants. The aim of the paper is to analyse the policy development process and the factors that influenced its evolution and content. [adapted from abstract]

This study reviewed the evidence for the use of mobile technology by community health workers to identify opportunities and challenges for strengthening health systems in resource-constrained settings. [from abstract]

This article reports on an intervention to enhance the knowledge and behavior of community health workers on providing adequate
education to patients on malaria. [adapted from author]

This article describes the Morang Innovative Neonatal Intervention
(MINI), which tested a replicable model for the community management of neonatal infections within the existing government health system through the use of female community health volunteers. [adapted from author]

This review was designed to find evidence of the effectiveness of CHWs in providing basic preventive and curative MNCH interventions, and to identify the factors that are crucial to their performance. [from abstract]

This protocol will test the effect of community mobilization through women’s groups, and health management committee strengthening, on institutional deliveries and home deliveries attended by trained health workers. [adapted from abstract]

This study was undertaken to assess the scope and nature of community-based education for various health worker cadres in Uganda. [from abstract]

This study assessed the quality of care provided by community health workers in managing cases of severe acute malnutrition according to a treatment algorithm. [from abstract]

This study tested a home-visits strategy to improve neonatal mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa by assessing the effect on all-cause neonatal mortality rate and essential newborn-care practices after community-based surveillance volunteers were trained to identify pregnant women in their community and to make two home visits during pregnancy and three in the first week of life to promote essential newborn-care practices. [adapted from summary]

This interview with Shaheen Hussain of Pakistan tells the story of how she became a field-based health educator with a social franchise of private reproductive health care providers and is a testimony of how this program not only touches the lives of the women who receive the reproductive health services but also of the health educators themselves.

Ram Shrestha’s 5.5 minute video advocates linking the formal health systems of the national government with the informal systems of the community groups in order for everyone to benefit from wider coverage of health services and improved health outcomes. [adapted from publisher]

This case study explores the significant role of community-based initiatives and the process of collaborating with communit organziations to address HIV within communities of high-risk populations in India. [adapted from author]

This study attempts to gather information on health care aides, a cadre that constitutes a significant component of the health care labor force providing home and community care in Canada, to fill gaps in basic information about this component of the workforce including motivations, retention, and adequacy of their training. [adapted from author]

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]

This paper from the International Conference on ICT for Africa reports on a mobile phone application designed to support community health workers in providing family planning counseling to their clients. [from abstract]

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 article describes an assessment of the effects of community mobilisation through women’s groups, and health education through female volunteer peer counsellors on rates of infant care, feeding, morbidity, and mortality. [adapted from author]

The aim of this study is to examine the safety and feasibility of community-based medical care for survivors of sexual assault to contribute to building an evidence base on alternative models of care in humanitarian settings. [from abstract]

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]