Community health workers at the dawn of a new era: 6. Recruitment, training, and continuing education.

Background: This is the sixth of our 11-paper supplement entitled "Community Health Workers at the Dawn of New Era". Expectations of community health workers (CHWs) have expanded in recent years to encompass a wider array of services to numerous subpopulations, engage communities to collaborate with and to assist health systems in responding to complex and sometimes intensive threats. In this paper, we explore a set of key considerations for training of CHWs in response to their enhanced and changing roles and provide actionable recommendations based on current evidence and case examples for health systems leaders and other stakeholders to utilize.

Training Curriculum, Skills, and Competencies for Global Health Leaders: Good Practices and Lessons Learned.

Objectives: This paper aims to depict unique perspectives and to compare and contrast three leadership programs for global health in order to enable other training institutions to design impactful curricula.

Methods: We purposively selected three global health training programs. We used a six-step curriculum development framework to systematically compare the curriculum process across programs and to identify best practices and factors contributing to the impact of each of these programs.

Towards Core Competencies for Health Policy and Systems Research (HPSR) Training: Results From a Global Mapping and Consensus-Building Process.

Background: As the field of health policy and systems research (HPSR) continues to grow, there is a recognition of the need for training in HPSR. This aspiration has translated into a multitude of teaching programmes of variable scope and quality, reflecting a lack of consensus on the skills and practices required for rigorous HPSR. The purpose of this paper is to identify an agreed set of core competencies for HPSR researchers, building on the previous work by the Health Systems Global (HSG) Thematic Working Group on Teaching & Learning.

Comparative analysis of country-level enablers, barriers and recommendations to strengthen institutional capacity for evidence uptake in decision-making.

Background: Evidence-based decision-making is crucial to leadership in the health sector to identify country-level priorities and generate solutions supported by rigorous research. Barriers and enablers have been explored, but limited evidence about what works to strengthening capacity at individual and institutional levels within countries has been reported, and inconsistent use of evidence to inform policy-making is a persistent challenge and concern.

Methods: We conducted a framework analysis comparing experiences of nine purposively selected countries (Chile, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa and Sri Lanka).

Comparative Case Analysis of the Role of Community Health Workers in Rural and Low-Income Populations of West Virginia and the United States.

The rural United States, including West Virginia, has decades of experience engaging communities and utilizing community health workers (CHWs). This study aims to inform policy and planning by comparing how 2 county-level CHW programs engage with communities. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with 19 community representatives and 20 health workers and archival documents and published literature reviews.