Harnessing Expertise to Optimize Community Health.
How six innovative partners joined forces to accelerate the adoption of high-impact community health systems design.
As far back as 1998, the World Health Organization (WHO) noted, “There is no longer any question of whether CHWs can be key agents in improving health; the question is how their potential can be realized.”
Yet in 2017, nearly two decades on from that proclamation – after rigorous studies demonstrating CHWs can effectively deliver health services as diverse as birth control injections and HIV care management – large-scale national CHW programs continued to struggle to replicate the success of smaller, targeted community-based interventions.
As global health leaders focused their attention on targets in the newly developed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the future of the professional CHW (proCHW) movement hung in the balance. Without a significant change in trajectory, CHW programs were destined to remain as small, disconnected operations, with the potential to transform population health in isolated communities if they worked.
Fortunately, with the WHO commencing work on the development of its inaugural guidelines on health policy and system support for CHW programs, a group of innovative community health implementers decided to take action on solving the challenge of delivering effective community health programs at scale.
In 2017, Community Health Impact Coalition (CHIC) started as a loose collaboration between six established organizations in the community health field: Partners in Health, Living Goods, Last Mile Health, Muso, Possible, and Integrate Health.
Our early members shared the common goal of accelerating the adoption of high-impact community health systems design. Each organization had extensive real-world experience with implementing successful CHW programs, and became passionate about sharing their practice wisdom.
The groundbreaking first contribution of our Coalition came in the form of the 2017 Practitioner Expertise to Optimize Community Health Systems report. This paper was designed specifically to address the current challenge of delivering CHW programs at scale.
By collaboratively analyzing the standard operating procedures of each of our member organizations, we released a set of eight best practices that in our collective experience, drive CHW program quality and effectiveness. The report identified these best practices to be the minimum viable elements needed for CHWs to succeed. In 2018, the WHO CHW guidelines incorporated seven of the eight best practices from the practitioner experience report
creating a new movement
Energized by our initial success, CHIC members took up the mantle of building a professional CHW (proCHW) movement to promote and support the implementation of evidence-based community health programs across the globe. This mission required a drastic re-thinking of the traditional competition and separation that traditionally existed between organizations.
CHIC was founded on the principle of collective action through radical collaboration. And by choosing not to compete but rather to cooperate, we make a bold statement against the dominant paradigm.
Rather than protecting our intellectual property, we’re unpacking it, sharing it, and making it public. Others took note – the Coalition’s innovative approach and early wins were reported on by the Aspen Institute, CHW Central, Skoll Foundation, and Devex.
This new paradigm has clearly resonated. CHIC has grown into an audacious, 60+ country movement that includes thousands of CHWs and dozens of global health organizations.
We aim to make proCHWs the norm worldwide by changing guidelines, funding, and policy. We research to equip international norm setters with evidence. We advocate to influence global financing institutions. And we activate in-country CHW networks.
Systems change is a team sport, and we’d love to have you join the team.
RESOURCE LIBRARY
How six innovative partners joined forces to accelerate the adoption of high-impact community health systems design.
Despite decades of global health investment, 1 billion people cannot access essential health services.
The role of community health workers (CHWs) in improving health equity and coverage.