Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Chronic diseases are the main causes of death in Brazil and around the world. They include heart diseases, lung diseases, diabetes and cancers. They are a big health challenge as there are not enough health professionals, especially doctors, to care for people with these diseases in an optimal way. One of the solutions is to share some of the clinical responsibilities with community health workers (CHWs). CHWs are people from the community who are briefly trained to provide basic health education to people in their neighborhood. These CHWs are integrated in family health teams and are very present in Brazil and in the city of São Paulo, where our research partner is located. CHWs do home visits, and work with nurses and physicians on a daily basis. However, we do not know much about their knowledge and current practices related to prevention and control of chronic diseases. Therefore, this participatory research project will first send an online survey to all CHWs working for our research partner. This survey will assess what they currently know and do about chronic diseases. In a second phase, focus groups will be conducted with CHWs and the nurses and physicians they work with regularly. The focus groups will address questions of potential knowledge gaps, of how CHWs could contribute more effectively to chronic disease management in collaboration with nurses and physicians, and of additional training needs. The results of this project will help improve community health workers' knowledge and skills. This has the potential of increasing the effectiveness of family health teams in providing preventive care and treatments to people at risk of or living with chronic diseases in their community. In turn, this could translate into better health outcomes on the long term and on a larger scale.