Empowerment of Community for Universal Health Coverage: Home Health Guides, the sustainable solution for the human resource gap

Abstract

The shortfall in the health workforce laid the foundation to establish a supplementary cadre of
healthcare workers at the grassroots level. This additional team would serve to strengthen the current
healthcare infrastructure and facilitate effective communication and coordination between the community and
the healthcare system. The importance of this cadre was recommended in various health committees and was
revealed through previous ICMR research and followed in the ongoing Labike project which aims primarily to
evaluate the Acceptability, Scalability, and Linkage within the Health System of ICMR Pre-Validated
Labike/Technologies for Screening and Diagnosis in Rural and Urban Population.
We identified young volunteers both from rural and urban settings to participate in the study
without incentives. The Certificate of home-based healthcare course was given to these volunteers in
coordination with IGNOU and around fifty families were assigned to each candidate to monitor and record the
healthcare needs of these families. Although the idea was extremely useful for the community and the
healthcare delivery system. However, we faced many challenges at every level starting from the identification
of the candidates, enrollment in the course, training etc.