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Cape Town, January 25, 2021 – Frontline health workers, to be honored during the World Health Organization’s International Year of the Health Worker in 2021, must be better supported in their vital role in fight the global COVID-19 pandemic at the community level, according to global health technology experts, BroadReach Group.
Frontline health workers, and in particular community health workers (CHWs), help educate communities, collect baseline data, and provide vital frontline health interventions in response to the COVID outbreak -19. According to BroadReach Group, a global social health company that uses innovation and technology to empower human action, they can only continue to play a vital role in the global pandemic response if they receive the right support. BroadReach, in partnership with South African health authorities and with support from PEPFAR and USAID, enabled the deployment of technology, training of personnel and manpower during the pandemic.
The role of community health workers (CHWs)
“The disease starts in our communities and the solutions are also there. Our CHWs enable our vulnerable rural and urban communities to take care of their own health and assist in the early detection of infections and rapid referral to nearby health facilities. Working in communities during a public health crisis, you need buy-in and participation, and CHWs are essential to achieve this. We cannot face this pandemic without our CHWs. In fact, we need to train more local people to do this kind of work in vulnerable communities, ”says Dr Lerato Pitso, public health physician and BroadReach epidemiologist.
During the pandemic, the BroadReach group was particularly active in South Africa, where approximately 60,000 public sector CHWs put their lives at risk to work in their communities during the pandemic to help limit infections as part of the USAID APACE award. . BroadReach helped provincial health departments in Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal deploy an army of trained CHWs armed with the Vantage cloud-based screening app to rural and urban communities during the pandemic to perform more than 3, 2 million COVID-19 tests.
“All health workers are important, but CHWs in particular, because they work on the front lines and often receive the least attention, education, capacity building and compensation – yet in the global pandemic we put so much pressure on them to actively participate. find those people who have been infected. They carry a burden like a mother because they go there and take care of their community, even when it is difficult. They are the very essence of the starting point in the fight against the disease, at the local level, ”says Ilona Smart, director of clients at Vantage Health Technologies – part of the BroadReach group of companies.
Smart said many CHWs had to be redirected from tuberculosis, HIV and other serious illnesses in 2020 to COVID-19, which had become the biggest public health crisis of the year.
These field workers were to be trained to use new processes and technologies in record time, including the Vantage app, a cloud-based AI platform used by CHWs for real-time screening and research. contacts. This data is consolidated and instantly available to enable provincial leaders to make critical resource allocation and care decisions as the pandemic evolves. Vantage is also connected to the National COVID Command Center.
In his address to the nation in mid-December, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said more than 38,000 public sector health workers have tested positive for the coronavirus. Of these, nearly 5,000 were hospitalized and 391 died. These numbers increased further during the second wave. “As a nation, we owe so much to these courageous and dedicated people and their families, because without them we would not have come this far,” said Ramaphosa. At BroadReach, more than 240 of its healthcare workers have tested positive and a colleague has been tragically lost to the virus.
Smart said the burnout of CHWs and other frontline workers was a major concern. “Before the pandemic, the public health workers we trained and supported worked primarily with TB and HIV patients and their workload was around two households per day. Now, these same CHWs serve 10 households per day and interview each member of each household with a 33-question questionnaire to determine if they are suspected cases of COVID or people under investigation, as they say. Special measures have been put in place to recognize their challenges and support our CHWs.
CHW challenges to overcome in 2021
Dr Pitso said it was essential to realize that 70% of the world’s healthcare workers are women, who often do unpaid household chores and are vulnerable in many ways. “Yet they serve all of humanity. Let us be compassionate and do our part to protect them.
“The severe shortage of health workers is a global problem, even more so in Africa with limited resources. South Africa also has a chronic problem of a shortage of CHWs and an uneven distribution among the provinces, but we are counting on them to prevent the rest of the health system from being overloaded, ”said Dr Pitso. Considering the ideal ratio of health workers to population, the threshold for the Sustainable Development Goals index is 4.45 physicians, nurses and midwives per 1,000 inhabitants, but in many regions this is number is rarely reached.
“In order for us to meet the required standards for universal health coverage (UHC) by 2030, we need to have the right human resources for health with the right mix of skills. Unfortunately, our healthcare system is overwhelmed by the current increase in the number of patients. Health care workers are overworked and tired. Mental health should be a priority and health workers should be supported and provided with self-management training and debriefing sessions to equip them to cope with the increasing demands for health care.
All Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO) will celebrate the International Year of Health and Care Workers (JHCW) in 2021.
BroadReach Group is a group of social impact companies focused on harnessing innovation and technology to empower people. Through its Vantage Health Technology business, they have provided training and support to thousands of healthcare workers who have completed over six million community screenings on the Vantage cloud platform, in partnership with local health authorities for the COVID-19 pandemic.
SIDE BAR: A case study from Mpumalanga on how to support CHWs during the pandemic
It is vital to support the work of community health workers (CHWs) at three levels: people, process and technology. A recent collaboration between BroadReach Group and the Mpumalanga health department to train and deploy thousands of CHWs to be the first line of defense in their communities during the pandemic, is a case in point.
“The anxiety levels were very high regarding our CHWs themselves contracting COVID, as well as the new technology they had to use in the field having been accustomed to paper systems in the past,” said Ilona Smart. , Client Director responsible for COVID-19 Response at the BroadReach Group.
“The Mpumalanga health department has been excellent in addressing anxiety levels among CHWs head on. They educated their CHWs on what COVID was, how to protect themselves, gave them the necessary protective equipment and conducted virtual training. BroadReach then sent in their change management experts to help with the adoption of new technologies, for the very vital data collection that CHWs need to do, so that we could get a full picture of what was happening on the ground.
The province’s 4,500 CHWs provided feedback to their supervisors via the Vantage app on the challenges they faced in the field, primarily in rural settings, and these challenges were addressed in a daily meeting between the ministry and BroadReach. The daily data they collected helped the province determine where COVID hotspots were forming, how many citizens were likely to require hospitalization, and which facilities had the capacity and which did not. All of this basic data has helped clinics and hospitals across the province prepare for the influx.
“A real tribute must be paid to the CHWs who were our frontline workers with this dreaded disease,” said Smart.
“End-to-end collaboration, where you see people, processes and technology coming together, from the local level where our CHWs operate, to our hospitals and health systems in general, is really our only way out. of this pandemic. CHWs need more credit and our support because we cannot do this without them. ”
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