Promoting Healthy Choices and Community Change: An E-Learning Program for Promotores de Salud

As trusted members of their communities, promotores de salud are uniquely positioned as change agents who can share information, resources, and health promotion interventions with community members. The HHS Office of Minority Health is developing an e-learning program, Promoting Healthy Choices and Community Changes, designed to build the capacity of promotores de salud to promote individual-level and community-level changes toward good health. The e-learning program will reinforce promotores’ role as change agents by enabling promotores to facilitate individual behavior change, as well as community change, that promote health.

Promoting Healthy Choices and Community Change will offer strategies that promotores can use to educate community members about making healthy choices and changes, both individually and as a community. Promotores will be able to employ these strategies to strengthen the community work with which they are already engaged (e.g., nutrition outreach, cancer awareness, diabetes screening). The e-learning format will feature interactive, multimedia lessons through which learners progress at their own pace, with brief pretests and posttests to determine the extent of knowledge gained. The program will be available in Spanish and English for both individual learners and group learning.

This presentation will discuss the development of the e-learning program, expected to launch to the public in late 2014. Among the development steps to be presented are aggregated results from nationwide pilot test focus groups with promotores, which are designed to elicit feedback from promotores on the e-learning program, and will be conducted in early 2014.