Dear Henry,
You wrote: "As far as I can tell, the paper made minimal impact if any on the global discourse about building strong CHW and community-based primary health care programs, but perhaps it did make a small contribution toward to emerging consensus that we need to strengthen these programs if we are going to accelerate progress in achieving global health goals and reaching health for all."
https://www.hifa.org/dgroups-rss/who-more-half-child-deaths-are-due-cond...
The paper - Expanding the population coverage of evidence-based interventions with community health workers to save the lives of mothers and children - concluded that 'If near-universal (90%) coverage of evidence-based interventions for mothers and children were achieved in 73 Countdown countries, 6.9 million lives would be saved during the period from 2016 to 2020, and the overall number of death would be reduced by 41% compared to baseline levels.' 'This would be achieved by expansion of CHWs to provide 90% coverage of timely interventions.' These conclusions should be enough for policymakers to take notice and consider expansion of CHW programmes in their country. But in reality, there is a relative failure of health research commuication to policymakers.
On Monday 5 September we are starting a new thematic discussion on the HIFA forums, including CHIFA: Effective communication of health research to policymakers.
I would like to invite you and others to comment on the communication of health research on CHWs. In your experience, what methods are effective (publication of papers, policy briefs, press releases, face-to-face meetings, WHO guidance...) to raise awareness of individual research papers and/or the cumulative evidence?
Read more about our TDR-supported project here: https://www.hifa.org/projects/new-effective-communication-health-researc...
Best wishes, Neil
Neil Pakenham-Walsh, Global Coordinator HIFA, www.hifa.org neil@hifa.org
Working in official relations with WHO
