Looking at research on Community Health Workers

by Jon Scaccia February 18, 2022

The problem with being super busy is that I rarely get time to sit down in right. A problem no one can relate to, I’m sure.

Our sister organization, The Dawn Chorus Group is going to be contributing to an evaluation of an initiative to increase the number of community health workers in a specific area. Community health workers are frontline public health outreach personnel who have a deep knowledge of their communities’ issues and cultural backgrounds, as well as an intimate connection to the people they serve.

And there has been A LOT of research of them and their row. We were able to pull about 3800 recent articles on community health workers. And I really emphasize “recent.” The oldest article only goes back to November 2020!

Visualizing the abstracts as a word cloud shows many of the areas in which these CHWs work –> covid (natch), but also mental health and HIV.

A network plot goes into a bit more nuance. What’s also interesting is that the methods that are used to study CHWs show up quite a bit.

Leadership and CHWs

After running a topic model, we saw that the most frequently occurring topics showed concerned leadership and global health;

Here are some examples of these topics.

The global role, impact, and limitations of Community Health Workers (CHWs) in breast cancer screening: a scoping review and recommendations to promote health equity for all

With so much recent research, it may behoove us to go even deeper and bigger. This is where our upcoming white paper generator may be helpful. Keep your eyes on this space for when we go live.