Shams El Arifeen, Aliki Christou, Laura Reichenbach, Ferdous Arfina Osman et al.
In Bangladesh, rapid advancements in coverage of many health interventions have coincided with impressive reductions in fertility and rates of maternal, infant, and childhood mortality. These advances, which have taken place despite such challenges as widespread poverty, political instability, and f...
Robert E. Black, Carl E. Taylor, Shobha Arole, Abhay Bang et al.
BACKGROUND: The contributions that community-based primary health care (CBPHC) and engaging with communities as valued partners can make to the improvement of maternal, neonatal and child health (MNCH) is not widely appreciated. This unfortunate reality is one of the reasons why so few priority coun...
Meike Schleiff, Iain Aitken, Mohammad Ariful Alam, Zufan Abera Damtew et al.
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...
Henry B. Perry, Mushtaque Chowdhury, Miriam Were, Karen LeBan et al.
BACKGROUND: This is the concluding paper of our 11-paper supplement, "Community health workers at the dawn of a new era". METHODS: We relied on our collective experience, an extensive body of literature about community health workers (CHWs), and the other papers in this supplement to identify the mo...
Emma Sacks, Meike Schleiff, Miriam Were, Ahmed Mushtaque Raza Chowdhury et al.
can also be essential for guiding interventions aimed at behavioural modification and for facilitating adaptation to changing environmental, demographic and epidemiological conditions. ommunities can consist of a wide and diverse set of actors, from geographically defined groups and local governance...
Henry B. Perry, Bahie Mary Rassekh, Sundeep Gupta, Jess Wilhelm et al.
BACKGROUND: Community-based primary health care (CBPHC) is an approach used by health programs to extend preventive and curative health services beyond health facilities into communities and even down to households. Evidence of the effectiveness of CBPHC in improving maternal, neonatal and child hea...
Henry B. Perry, Lauren Crigler
The CHW Reference Guide is an in-depth review of issues and questions that should be considered when addressing key issues relevant for large-scale CHW programs.The CHW Reference Guide is designed for new CHW programs that are beginning the planning process as well as for existing programs that are ...
Emma Sacks, Robert Chad Swanson, Jean J. Schensul, Anna Gleave et al.
Definitions of health systems strengthening (HSS) have been limited in their inclusion of communities, despite evidence that community involvement improves program effectiveness for many health interventions. We review 15 frameworks for HSS, highlighting how communities are represented and find few ...
Lucy E. Marcil, Kaosar Afsana, Henry B. Perry
The processes for implementing effective programs at scale in low-income countries have not been well-documented in the peer-reviewed literature. This article describes the initial steps taken by one such program--the BRAC Manoshi Project, which now reaches a population of 6.9 million. The project h...
Henry B. Perry
Henry B. Perry, Bahie Mary Rassekh, Sundeep Gupta, Paul Freeman
BACKGROUND: There is limited evidence about the long-term effectiveness of integrated community-based primary health care (CBPHC) in improving maternal, neonatal and child health. However, the interventions implemented and the approaches used by projects with such evidence can provide guidance for e...
Henry B. Perry, R. Weierbach, Iqbal Hossain, Md. Rafiqul Islam
Neonatal tetanus is still an important public health problem in both urban and rural Bangladesh, with an estimated 41,000 cases occurring annually. This article analyses the coverage of tetanus toxoid (TT) immunizations among women of reproductive age in Zone 3 of Dhaka City in 1995. Although 85% of...
Taposh Kumar Biswas, Hasnat Sujon, M. Hafizur Rahman, Henry B. Perry et al.
BACKGROUND: Healthcare service delivery systems need to ensure standard quality of care (QoC) for achieving expected health outcomes. Although Bangladesh has a good healthcare service delivery system, there are major concerns about the quality of maternal and newborn health (MNH) care services, whic...
Prakriti Shrestha, Kaosar Afsana, Manuj C. Weerasinghe, Henry B. Perry et al.
The growing health challenges in South Asia require further adaptations of community health worker (CHW) programs as a key element of primary health care (PHC). This paper provides a comparative analysis of CHW programs in five countries (Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka), examines ...
Henry B. Perry, Rose Zulliger, Kerry Scott, Dena Javadi et al.