Community health workers in humanitarian settings (search in October 2018)
Citation: Miller NP, Ardestani FB, Dini HS, et al. Community health workers in humanitarian settings: Scoping review. Journal of Global Health. 2020;10(2):020602.
Language: Abstract and full text available in EN.
Free to view: Yes.
Funding sources: Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
What is this? Community-health workers can provide access to essential health and nutrition services to populations in humanitarian and crises settings.
In this scoping review, the authors searched for studies exploring the role of community health workers in delivering health or nutrition services in low- or middle-income countries (particularly in conflict-related settings or disease outbreak settings). They did not restrict their searches by date or language of publication and did the search in October 2018. They included 219 documents (181 of which were journal articles), which reported research from a wide variety of settings.
What was found: Community health workers can provide services and critical emergency response activities during crises, including population displacement.
The selection of community health workers, their engagement with local communities and communication with local supervisors are key facilitators to successful implementation.
Communities that do not have local health workers experienced less access to services, especially when travel was limited.
Implications: The authors of the review concluded that community health workers should be incorporated in future interventions in humanitarian settings. They also stated that more rigorous assessments of service delivery by community health workers are needed.
Other considerations: The authors of the review discussed their findings in the context of place of residence and occupation.
This summary was prepared by Ana Pizarro, checked by Yasmeen Saeed and Cristián Mansilla, and finalized by Mike Clarke.