The parent of a child with asthma, a person recovering from addiction, a formerly incarcerated youth, a public housing tenant who serves as an advocate for her neighbors, a mother moving from welfare to the workforce---all are good candidates for employment as community health workers (CHWs). CHWs bring a wealth of community knowledge, life experience and personal strength to their challenging roles. Effective CHW education programs build on these strengths and provide comprehensive training in core competencies. This CHW training moves beyond the provision of knowledge about a specific health topic to include a variety of learning strategies that promote personal development and the mastery of a set of skills including: engaging with families, health education, advocacy, home visiting, documentation, self-organization and self-care.
The Community Health Worker Education Project at Hunter College provides training to CHWs who work with families of children with asthma in New York City neighborhoods whose rates of childhood asthma hospitalization are among the highest in the nation. Lessons learned and tools developed in skill-based training of these CHWs will be presented, as well as strategies and tools used in performance-based evaluation of CHW competencies.
Learning Objectives: At the end of this session participants will understand: 1) the importance of skill-building activities and performance-based evaluation in community health worker (CHW) training 2) innovative strategies used to develop and evaluate asthma education and case management skills in a group of NYC community health workers 3) how to apply these strategies in their own CHW programs.
Keywords: Competency, Health Workers Training
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: Hunter College Center for Occupational & Environmental Health
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.