Household coverage, quality and costs of care provided by community health worker teams and the determining factors: findings from a mixed methods study in South Africa.

Objective: Community health workers (CHWs) are undertaking more complex tasks as part of the move towards universal health coverage in South Africa. CHW programmes can improve access to care for vulnerable communities, but many such programmes struggle with insufficient supervision. In this paper, we assess coverage (proportion of households visited by a CHW in the past year and month), quality of care and costs of the service provided by CHW teams with differing configurations of supervisors, some based in formal clinics and some in community health posts.

Relationship power and HIV sero-status: an analysis of their relationship among low-income urban Zimbabwean postpartum women.

Background: HIV disproportionately infects women in many regions. Zimbabwe is one of the countries, most heavily affected. Unequal gender power relations between men and women can increase women's vulnerability to HIV.

Integrating community health workers into the formal health system to improve performance: a qualitative study on the role of on-site supervision in the South African programme.

Objectives: To explore the role of on-site supervision in community health worker (CHW) programmes and CHW integration into the health system. We compared the functioning of CHW teams reporting to a clinic-based nurse with teams supervised by a community-based nurse. We also consider whether a junior nurse can provide adequate supervision, given the shortage of senior nurses.