Uganda Takes Major Steps to Professionalize Community Health Workforce

Kim, a village health team (VHT) worker, returns to the health center where her team is based after a busy day in parishes surrounding Moroto, Uganda. Photo by Tommy Trenchard for IntraHealth International.March 13, 2018Until now, many of Uganda ’s180,000 community health workers have gone unaccounted for in the formal health system. Who are they? What services are they providing, and who trained them? The Uganda Ministry of Health is using a new registry —developed usingIntraHealth International ’s open sourceiHRIS software—to find out.The registry tracks critical personnel data that answer these questions, and its implementation is one of the first steps in a national plan to transform and professionalize Uganda ’s community-based health workforce. With funding from UNICEF and the Korea International Cooperation Agency, IntraHealth worked closely with the One Million Community Health Workers Campaign, UNICEF, and Uganda’s Ministry of Health to develop the system.Uganda ' s community health workers are a crucial link to health care at the household level.So far, Uganda has implemented the registry in 11 districts and integrated it with the government ’sHRIS portal. Now the Ministry of Health is working with IntraHealth and others to roll it out across the whole country.The registry provides health officials with the data they need to understand the size and scope of the existing community health workforce and to integrate these workers into the health system, w...
Source: IntraHealth International - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Source Type: news