Quality improvement methods as a people-centred approach to community health
By Miriam Taegtmeyer, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and co-Director of the REACHOUT Consortium, and member of the HSG Community Health Worker TWG
This blog post is part of a series on people-centred research methods for health systems development published in conjunction with a Twitter chat on the same topic. Please see below for links to other blog posts in this series.
Community health workers (CHWs) have been in the news recently with calls for the scale up of close-to-community (CTC) health programmes being heralded as a ‘good buy’ for development. But how do we ensure that these programmes run efficiently and equitably in ways that are owned by health care staff, CHWs and communities? This is the question that the REACHOUT consortium is seeking to explore with its project in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi and Mozambique. The CTC providers we work with include CHWs, midwives, traditional birth attendants, informal private practitioners and lay counsellors.
Four key areas of concern have emerged that have potential to undermine CHW programme effectiveness and equity: 1. supervision; 2. community engagement; 3. referrals; and 4. coordination between stakeholders. Scale-up of CHW programmes is seen as a way of reaching universal health coverage, but rapid scale-up that does not address these concerns poses a potential risk to service quality and equity.
What methods have we used?
Over the last few years we have started to identify how CTC services can best be delivered, to implement change and to document lessons. In our first year we combined literature reviews with an in-depth context analysis in each country.
Currently we are doing research on the impact of group supervision as a means to improve performance and community engagement. The challenge is to build on these research foundations, shifting away from researcher-led data collection to an embedded culture of data collection and use for quality improvement and for monitoring equity among the teams of health professionals delivering these services. CHWs form important intermediates between communities and the health sector and locally developed solutions have a far better chance of success.
The people in health systems need to lead programme improvements
We define quality improvement as a systematic approach to planning defining, monitoring, improving and evaluating community health programmes. Through our work we are embedding into CHW scale-up, tried and tested quality improvement methods that are easy to use, simple to do and where data are collected, analysed and used by communities and CHWs to improve things.
It is not without its challenges. Government standards and guidelines are not widely known or disseminated and few people in the health system and in the community are clear on what their roles in quality improvement for community health might be. There are far too many tools and documents that are not owned by communities and CHWs. The photo above was taken at a national stakeholder workshop and shows piles of guidelines, strategies and tools that had never been sent out to regions and districts.
A few simple, robust tools chosen and used locally have far more chance of success. When you accept that there is no need to get everything perfect straight away it turns out that quite a small change, done well, can be very inspiring.
I am really looking forward to the twitter chat on people-centred research methods for health system development and would love to hear from others trialling innovative methods. Follow the Twitter hash tag #HSR2015 and visit us at @reachout_tweet.
Other blog posts in this series:
- Life histories: A research method to capture people’s experiences of health systems in post-conflict countries
- The Ebola outbreak and the wider health system: understanding impact and the way forward in Liberia
