Community health workers for universal health-care coverage: from fragmentation to synergy | WHO Bulletin

To achieve universal health coverage, health systems will have to reach into every community, including the poorest and hardest to access. Scaling up and maintaining community health workers (CHW) programmes is fraught with a host of challenges: poor planning; multiple competing actors with little coordination; fragmented, disease-specific training; donor-driven management and funding; tenuous linkage with the health system; poor coordination, supervision and support, and under-recognition of CHWs’ contribution.

CHWs will need to be better integrated into national health-care systems in terms of employment, supervision, support and career development. Strong leadership from the public sector will be needed to facilitate alignment with national policy frameworks and country-led coordination and to achieve synergies and accountability, universal coverage and sustainability.

This article analyze this issues.