I think a lot of people intuitively believe that training Community Health Workers is a good thing to do. Why not train (usually) women to provide basic health promotion and care to their communities, especially when those communities are rural and have poor access to health care? It makes sense.
And the model is being used by many, including us at RHC. Partners In Health made famous the accompagnateur program they began in Haiti. Many other countries have scaled such programs nationwide. But it still isn’t the norm.
This article in the Huffington Post discusses a fantastic report that came out this summer from a group of African leaders and others within the global health community. The report talks about CHWs as a big part of the solution to healthier populations in many developing countries and, more importantly, describes mechanisms to fund such programs on a large scale.
Energy and attention for CHW programs like ours excites me. Our program in Ghana is tiny in the grand scheme and has a long way to go to improve our interventions and integrate with the local health system, but it also has so much potential to make a difference. These programs work. When they are locally focused, taking into account the unique qualities of each community, they can work even better. And that’s what we’re trying to do.
