Announcing a new research collection on community health workers
By Kate Hawkins
One of the main purposes of the Thematic Working Group on Community Health Workers is to support the generation of evidence to inform the scale up of Community Health Worker programmes which is pragmatic and contextually embedded. To try and publish and promote good work in this area we partnered with Human Resources for Health on a thematic series. We are delighted to announce that the first papers from the article collection are out now!
What are people saying?
There are papers from a range countries about people working in quite different contexts and we also have articles which take an international or overarching approach. What seems clear is that CHW programme scale up is challenging in the face of health systems constraints and that there is no blue print approach. However, systematic and systemic interventions, for example related to human resource management or the governance of programmes is needed. Another key message is that it is important to, “put the human into human resources”, and that people-centred health systems need to understand community health workers as people with their own challenges, strengths and motivations. These can relate to incentives in the health system as well as the ways that they relate to community members and institutions. We also have a lot to learn about the costs of CHW programmes and how best to asses these.
Summary of the available papers
What next?
The thematic series is not finished yet and will run for some time to come. So look out for new papers and the editorial which brings together learning on what has been published so far. We have also asked some of the authors to tell us a bit more about their work. So expect blogs and other communications from the Group over the coming months.
Recent news
- Twitter chat: People-centred research methods for health system development, 28 July 2015
- Research can be a challenge: Reflections on ethical and practical dilemmas faced by our team in Bangladesh, 25 June 2015
- Innovation alive and well in Bangladesh and embodied in REACHOUT, 18 June 2015
This project is funded by the European Union.