During this episode Tiwonge speaks with Madeleine Ballard, executive director of the Community Health Impact Coalition, and Dickson Nassim Mbewe, a senior health surveillance assistant (community health worker) with the Malawi Ministry of Health. An important component of the VillageReach Supply Chain Integration Framework is how to get health products beyond the health facility and into the communities. An important vehicle for this is community health workers (CHWs), who are often the only contact people in hard-to-reach communities have with the public health system in Africa.
Madeleine opens the show by explaining what CHWs do and their contributions to the health system, including their huge impact in terms of saving lives. Dickson then gives his perspective as a CHW serving his community for the last 17 years, describing the preventive and curative services he provides. But CHWs can not provide these critical services without consistent access to health products. Listen to the conversation as Madeleine and Dickson discuss some of the challenges CHWs face and how to address these challenges and ensure CHWs are supervised, counted, supplied, paid and integrated into public health supply chains.
Listen now to learn more about the important role of CHWs.
Read the most recent research on CHWs access to essential medicines from CHIC.
Read VillageReach’s Supply Chain Integration Framework to learn more: www.productstopeople.org.
Read more about VillageReach’s Supply Chain for Community Health Workers solution.
Links:
VillageReach
Community Health Impact Coalition
Dickson Nassim Mbewe
Madeleine Ballard on LinkedIn
Tiwonge Mkandawire on LinkedIn
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Getting Supplies Beyond the Health Facility | Products to People podcast - Listen or read transcript on Metacast
