After a decline in enthusiasm for national community health worker (CHW) programmes in the 1980s, these have re-emerged globally, particularly in the context of HIV. This paper examines the case of South Africa, where there has been rapid growth of a range of lay workers (home-based carers, lay counsellors, DOT supporters etc.) principally in response to an expansion in budgets and programmes f...

BACKGROUND Health worker motivation can potentially affect the provision of health services. The HIV pandemic has placed additional strain on health service provision through the extra burden of increased testing and counselling, treating opportunistic infections and providing antiretroviral treatment. The aim of this paper is to explore the challenges generated by HIV care and treatment and th...

Acute respiratory infections, diarrhea and fever are very common in children below the age of five years. All children suffer from these illnesses several times each year. However, during natural disasters like floods children are even more vulnerable to these diseases and death. Pneumonia, diarrhea, measles and malaria, and associated malnutrition, are responsible for over 60% deaths in childr...

Direct observation (DO) with re-examination (RE) by a skilled clinician is a rigorous method for assessing health worker performance, but is not always feasible. We assessed the performance of 131 community health workers in Malawi in community case management of sick children with cough and fast breathing, fever, and diarrhea. We compared estimates of correct treatment measured through DO with...

from 22 may 1976 to 19 february 1977 out of 27742 patients which were referred to health and social welfare network of west azerbaijan in chonqralu (field laboratory of school of public health and institute of public health research in health services development research project in iran), 22693 (81.81%) simple cases were managed by the behvarz (female front line health worker), in nine health ...

The focus of community health workers on health disparities in vulnerable communities means that they address issues of poverty, while many recipients of psychiatric rehabilitation services live at or below the poverty line. Their focus on improving health in low-income populations of color is in line with some of our field's biggest challenges at this point in history, including poverty, cultu...

BACKGROUND Surveillance systems are increasingly relying upon community-based or crowd-sourced data to complement traditional facilities-based data sources. Data collected by community health workers during the routine course of care could combine the early warning power of community-based data collection with the predictability and diagnostic regularity of facility data. These data could infor...

THIS PAPER DESCRIBES THE SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE OF A SYSTEM DESIGNED IN RESPONSE TO THE HEALTH DEVELOPMENT POTENTIAL OF TWO CONCOMITANT TRENDS IN POOR COUNTRIES: i) The rapid expansion of community health worker deployment, now estimated to involve over a million workers in Africa and Asia, and ii) the global proliferation of mobile technology coverage and use. Known as the Mobile Technology for...

PURPOSE To explore roles and effectiveness of community health workers in research with ethnic minority women in the United States (US). METHODS Medline (1966-2002) and CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature; 1982-2002) databases were used to locate published research studies on the use of community health workers with ethnic minority women in the US. Key words for s...