Prioritising the role of community health workers in the COVID-19 response.

COVID-19 disproportionately affects the poor and vulnerable. Community health workers are poised to play a pivotal role in fighting the pandemic, especially in countries with less resilient health systems. Drawing from practitioner expertise across four WHO regions, this article outlines the targeted actions needed at different stages of the pandemic to achieve the following goals: (1) PROTECT healthcare workers, (2) INTERRUPT the virus, (3) MAINTAIN existing healthcare services while surging their capacity, and (4) SHIELD the most vulnerable from socioeconomic shocks. While decisive action must be taken now to blunt the impact of the pandemic in countries likely to be hit the hardest, many of the investments in the supply chain, compensation, dedicated supervision, continuous training and performance management necessary for rapid community response in a pandemic are the same as those required to achieve universal healthcare and prevent the next epidemic.

A text message-based intervention to bridge the healthcare communication gap in the rural developing world.

Healthcare delivery in the rural developing world is limited by a severe shortage of health workers as well as profound communicative and geographic barriers. Understaffed hospitals are forced to provide care for patients that reside at a great distance from the institutions themselves, sometimes more than 100 miles away. Community health workers (CHWs), volunteers from local villages, have been integral in bridging this patient-physician gap, but still lose enormous of amounts of time in transit between hospital and village. We report the results of a retrospective mobile health (mHealth) pilot at St. Gabriel's Hospital in Malawi designed to eliminate many of these trips in favor of communication via text messages. A group of 75 CHWs were supplied with cell phones and trained to utilize the network for a variety of usage cases, including patient adherence reporting, appointment reminders, and physician queries. At the end of the pilot, the hospital saved approximately 2,048 hours of worker time, $2,750 on net ($3,000 in fuel savings minus $250 in operational costs), and doubled the capacity of the tuberculosis treatment program (up to 200 patients). We conclude that mHealth interventions can provide cost-effective solutions to communication barriers in the setting of rural hospitals in the developing world.