International health workforce development enhancement in Senegal: The Peace Care partnership model

Peace Care is a collaboration between the Peace Corps, US Health Care Training Programs, US Schools of Public Health, Global Health Experts, and Global Communities to improve health. The model borrows from a community participatory model of engagement that involves partnership formation, assessment, project development, project implementation, evaluation and dissemination. Peace Care prioritizes health workforce capacity building within local health care systems using community involvement to identify priority needs with the aim to positively impact on global health disparities. The Peace Care Senegal project involved a collaboration between the health district of Saraya, Senegal, the Peace Corps and a Peace Care team from the University of Illinois at Chicago. The priority issues identified from the community assessment were cervical cancer screening, sexually transmitted infections (STI) and diarrhea. Over a three week period the US Peace Care team implemented a train the trainers approach to cervical cancer screening using Visual Inspection with Acetic Acid (VIA) which trained 5 master trainers who subsequently trained 14 other local health care workers. A total of 81 women were screened. In addition, an STI training and case exchange was provided to 15 trainees and a diarrhea prevention education session was presented to 50 women in a small rural village. Efforts to sustain these workforce enhancement interventions include a planned 3 month follow-up training on VIA, continuous provision of technical assistance from the US through internet/social media, ongoing process and impact evaluations and a follow-up visit to introduce cryotherapy.