Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health and Wellness today held a stakeholder forum for its National Community Health Strategy. The strategy will target community health workers in the rural areas and formalize the work that they do. The Technical Advisor of the Health Education & Community Participation Bureau told us more.
Kathleen Azueta Cho, Technical Advisor, Health Ed. & Community Participation Bureau, MOHW
"What this forum sets to do is to really obtain the recommendations, experiences, observations from various stakeholders that work or have a vested interest in community health. Another reason for this important forum is for us to formalize the formation of a national community health technical working group that looks at all these different stakeholders who work in community health and lastly we want to find way to leverage and gain in kind contributions for the sustainability of a program such as the community health worker program with that focus on community health and having these different partners will allow us to gain all these contributions, experiences."
"In most of these communities we have a community health worker who is a volunteer who works under the Ministry of Health and Wellness and oftentimes we find that we don't have enough nurses and doctors to be in each of these communities and so we rely on these individuals to provide basic health services, to provide basic health education, to serve as surveillance focal points, who sound the alarm system when we have a dengue outbreak or we have some influenza outbreak to respond to. And so in these communities, we rely on them as our first point of contact as it relates to health services."
"We're currently finishing the situational analysis phase, we will now do an operational phase which we have today through this forum and we've done data collection, we've done focus group discussions, we've done key informal interviews with relevant stakeholders that include members from NHI, members from the Ministry of Health and Wellness and so we plan to have an official launch in October of this year."
