Outreach Activities

Community Health Workers (CHWs):

FCEHA is working with CHWs who are already doing outreach activities through a number of agencies in the Miami inner city area. Legislators, policymakers, health care providers, public health professionals, and consumers have been searching for feasible strategies to overcome the barriers to providing increasingly inaccessible and costly health care that have contributed to troubling health disparities among groups. While there is no quick fix to the overall problem, one promising strategy that has been used internationally and which many communities have begun to adopt is the enlistment of CHWs. This is an idea that came out of the 1978 World Health Organization (WHO) Assembly in Almata, Russia.

CHWs are community members who work almost exclusively in community settings and serve as connectors between health care consumers and providers to promote health among groups that have traditionally lacked access to adequate care. CHWs are employed in diverse health care settings, including community-based organizations, insurance companies, hospitals, and health departments. Importantly, they come from the same underserved neighborhoods and share the same cultural experiences as the people they serve, thus bridging the gap between health care agencies and local communities.

Community Health Workers are also known as: lay health educators, promotoras, community health advisors, community health representatives, outreach workers, patient navigators, doulas, frontline workers. Through their first-hand experience and understanding of underserved and marginalized communities, CHWs are able to tackle the socioeconomic and cultural experiences that often result in disparities in health and health care. U.S.-based and international CHW programs have successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of CHWs in helping underserved individuals access health care in appropriate manners. CHWs reach underserved populations more effectively that high-cost media campaigns or high-tech interventions and can help improve the quality of care at comparatively low cost.