Community Health Program Report

Introduction

The community health programs can be defined generally as health education and health treatment plans for local communities typically focusing on individuals living under socioeconomically compromised conditions. Mostly these people do not have access to the health insurance and coverage services. Besides being non-profit in nature, these community health programs seek their funding via specialized departments which can both be government and non-government organizations as well as different donation sources (1). 

Community health workers

The marginalized communities of a country often lack not only in proper health care services but also there is not total access to the ones already available due to hindrance posed by various factors. Therefore, most of the initiatives of the health care for such freeze out communities hold the incorporation of community health worker (CHW) programs as their integral parts. Also, many of the developing countries have CHW programs implemented in large scales across all their areas. The credit for such wide applicability of the CHW programs lies in their success in the presence of applicable selection, pertinent trainings and subsequently the relevant continuing support. However, apart from the considerable successes in such plan, an observable failure has also been evident in the past mainly due to the reasons of poor planning and unworkable applications (2). 

Role of community health workers

The unique role of community health workers lies in their duty of addressing not only the health inequalities of a community but also identifying the contribution of socioeconomic drivers towards the development of a disease. The term ‘community health workers’ hold in it very broad category of jobs according to their relevant roles and titles. Some of the typical examples of their roles are community health promoter, community health advocate and community asthma educator. Of these, the last one is a specific title reflecting the services of a health worker in a particular area of health training or knowledge (3).

The success of a community health program lies in well designed and implemented platforms to carry out the respective community health interventions. The best conducted of these functional tasks are those in which there exists a cooperative partnership among the community members, the politicians and various public health professionals. Another aim of these effective partnerships include the collection and sharing of the local health data so as not only to answer the questions being raised by a community but also solve the associated arising problems in an efficient way. Moreover, the actions designed to be taken for a community are also guided by the community members themselves resulting in a type of implementation and feedback cycle helping to make the community health platforms better (4).

Brief history

The deployment of community health workers dates back to 1970a where they were first introduced to accomplish healthcare of mother and child health via management of infectious diseases with limited workforce and access to the baseline health services. Also, they were principally introduced in the low income countries first. However, many developing countries then followed the deployment of the community health workers especially to their remote and rural areas such as villages located at the peripheries of the cities. Moreover, the need of community health workers for such marginalized and disadvantaged communities lies not only in improving the health education of the populations but also for overall community development (5).

Community health worker program in India

The National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) first introduced the India’s community health program in 2005 by the name of Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA). It primarily is composed of the female health squads with the primary goal of the promotion of professional birth attendance mainly by the collaboration of an Anganwadi worker and an auxiliary nurse midwife (ANM). The major goal of this activist is to cover 1000 individuals by actively reaching out to the population. Also, the activist is meant to obtain compensations based on the service and performance to facilitate immunization, escort and referral services to achieve institutional deliverables (6).