Supporting Community Health Workers
World Vision engages in a wide range of community health activities globally, many of which draw on the efforts of community health workers or CHWs. CHWs are community-based members who have been trained to deliver basic health services but who do not hold a professional health qualification. While the roles and cadres of CHWs vary widely between programmes and countries, some central principles can be applied to ensure that projects will be established with quality, sustainability and effectiveness, regardless of the programme model that the CHWs are delivering.
World Vision's CHW programmes aim to work with existing health structures through strong, long-term partnerships in order to deliver consistently high standards of quality implementation, training and support, to enable community health workforces that are sustainable, functional and effective. World Vision is committed to ensuring community systems and health systems strengthening approaches.
World Vision's programme approach
World Vision’s CHW model gives field offices the agility to partner with their Ministries of Health (MoH) in locally appropriate ways, and enables a wide array of possible CHW service delivery to individuals and households, provided they can be shown to achieve sustainable impact at scale. The types of services that World Vision will support CHWs to deliver may include Social and Behaviour Change (SBC) using a dialogue counselling methodology previously known as Timed and Targeted Counselling (TTC), or the Nurturing Care Group (NCG) approach for example, but these are not mandatory nor always contextually appropriate. The services that CHWs provide and that WV supports will vary by context based on the epidemiology of the country and other identified determinants of child health, nutrition and well-being, and as per agreements that WV will reach together with the MoH and other partners.
World Vision’s Timed and Targeted Counselling (TTC) dialogue counselling methodology for community-based volunteers, groups and community health workers is designed to promote healthy practices for the individual and their immediate family through a series of home visits.
INTEGRATED COMMUNITY CASE MANAGEMENT (iCCM)
Integrated Community Case Management (iCCM) is a strategy to train, support, and supply CHWs to provide diagnostics and treatment for multiple illnesses specifically pneumonia, diarrhoea, and malaria for sick children of families with difficult access to case management at health facilities.
DIGITAL HEALTH: MOBILE SUPPORT FOR FRONTLINE HEALTH WORKERS
World Vision’s global digital health portfolio supports frontline health workers in projects across 11 countries. From October 2019 through September 2020, more than 3,100 community health workers used our digital health tools to reach more than 850,000 beneficiaries. Learn more about this game-changing initiative and about country deployments that support our maternal, newborn and child health and nutrition programming.
Resources
World Vision developed the Health Systems Assessment and Improvement Matrix (S-AIM) tool for assessing and improving health systems in support of Community Health Worker programmes, and piloted the tool in Kenya and Uganda.
In June 2020, World Vision conducted a rapid internal survey to assist in scaling up its work with CHWs as part of the COVID-19 Emergency Response, enabling World Vision to identify, mobilise, and support the CHWs appropriately. The survey was targeted at all 68 field offices implementing the COVID-19 response from all seven World Vision regions. As of October 2020, World Vision supported 184,229 CHWs in 46 countries. Learn More
World Vision’s brief - It takes Community Health Workers to end violence against children - summarises the findings from a 2019 research study “Understanding community health workers’ perceptions and practices in preventing, detecting and responding to violence against children” and offers recommendations for meaningfully involving community health workers in strategies to end violence against children and in existing and future World Vision interventions. See related article on CHW Central.
World Vision developed a tool to help community health workers, home visitors, and other partners understand how to counsel families to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake, and the questions and answers (messages) to use to be most effective: Home Visitors and Community Health Workers COVID-19 Vaccination Messaging Guide
In 2015, a global census of CHWs in 66 countries was conducted by World Vision International to assist in developing CHW technical capacity statements, grant proposals, and fundraising and marketing resources, as well as to assist in internal monitoring and reporting on our global commitments. Learn More
In 2013, WVI and CORE Group developed CHW "Principles of Practice": Guiding Principles for Non-Governmental Organisations and their Partners for coordinated national scale-up of Community Health Worker programmes.
Networks and Working Groups
Contact
For more information, please contact World Vision experts on Community Health Worker programming:
Michele Gaudrault and Esther Indriani at health@wvi.org
