There are over 300 Community healthcare workers across Belize, who are often the first point of contact when caring for residents in rural areas. If there is no hospital or clinic nearby, patients visit their community healthcare worker, and today The Community Health Unit engaged with them to offer assistance in the fields by way of a community health strategy. Jomarie Lanza stopped by the strategic planning session in Belize city this morning and here's here story:
The Community Health Unit, under the Ministry of Health and Wellness is taking a more active roll to support its community health workers countrywide, by developing a community health strategy to better identify solutions to the issues they face in delivering care to their patients. The technical advisor for HECOPAB told us more about today's stakeholder engagement to discuss the strategy they have devised.
Kathleen Azueta Cho, MOHW, Technical Advisor, HECOPAB
"So today we the Ministry of Health and Wellness is hosting a validation workshop for the National Community Health Strategy 2025 to 2030 and this is an activity that follows and initial, national forum that was held earlier in this year in August that brought together different partners to discuss this National Community Health Strategy and this strategy Is really a roadmap that will help strengthen our community health worker program in Belize under the HECOPAB unit. And the purpose of this strategy is to really address certain limitations that we have both financially and human resources and this is an opportunity for us to gain adaptable and sustainable interventions to strengthen community health in Belize and this strategy also provides a vision for empowering communities that can actively participate in bringing health equity and well being for their communities."
Roughly 5-8 community health workers were present at today's session including UNICEF, a valuable partner to the ministry who is also playing an active role in the implementation of this program.
Dr Olusola Oladeji, UNICEF Health & Nutrition Specialist
"For UNICEF we believe that for every patient to have access to permanent health care services the way to go is permanent healthcare and they can be no permanent care without community health workers because they are the frontlines service providers when it comes to ensuring everybody, whatever they need and have access to those services. So UNICEF decided that since 1982, UNICEF has been supporting the government of Belize to strengthen the community health workers program. When we started in 1982 UNICEF provided technical financial support and since then we have been supporting them. But this time around we felt it was important to develop a strategy that gives us a framework on what the community health workers program is supposed to be this strategy is going to be aligned with the national strategy that was launched last year so it shows that the community health workers program is linked to the national health strategy that is what we are doing today. So in the last few months in consultancies we engaged, with support from UNICEF the ministry of health and the stakeholder engagement, a strategy was developed and today we are bringing everyone together to validate that strategy."
Azueta Cho says that they should have something more concrete in the coming months.
Kathleen Azueta Cho, MOHW, Technical Advisor, HECOPAB
"So we hope to have this draft strategy reviewed by the ministry of health and wellness ultimately after compiling all the feedback from the participants today and we hope to have that by the end of this year so we can have an official launch in 2026 next year, early next year. What I like about this workshop is that we are reviewing the draft strategy and looking at ways of mobilizing resources. This is a good opportunity for us to gather different stakeholders to look at ways that we could strengthen partnerships because as I mentioned we have limitations, financially and human so looking at other ways of garnering this resources is very important and this forum allows for that."
