Every day in the world’s poorest countries, CHS (community health workers) journey out to rural and remote areas, over poor roads and waterways, where they provide basic primary healthcare services to those often at greatest risk of serious or even life-threatening conditions. CHWs diagnose pneumonia and malaria, educate and sensitize communities about Ebola and other infectious diseases, deliver vaccinations, promote sanitary practices, attend pregnancies and deliveries, and serve as a lifeline to the healthcare system for those who might otherwise lack access to primary health services altogether. By Andrew Schroeder, Director of Research and Analysis, Direct Relief
By Andrew Schroeder, Director of Research and Analysis, Direct Relief
Every day in the world’s poorest countries, CHS (community health workers) journey out to rural and remote areas, over poor roads and waterways, where they provide basic primary healthcare services to those often at greatest risk of serious or even life-threatening conditions. CHWs diagnose pneumonia and malaria, educate and sensitize communities about Ebola and other infectious diseases, deliver vaccinations, promote sanitary practices, attend pregnancies and deliveries, and serve as a lifeline to the healthcare system for those who might otherwise lack access to primary health services altogether.
These essential workers on the front lines of many of the world’s most significant health crises often go unheralded, untracked, and are insufficiently supported. For these reasons, among others, the One-Million Community Health Worker Campaign (1mCHW) and Direct Relief teamed up with Esri to build a set of mapping applications, called the Operations Room.
The Operations Room is an interactive online inventory of CHW programs that are public, private, or NGO-operated in sub-Saharan Africa. It contains data on CHW counts and population coverage, and in many ways inaugurates the process of bringing systematic visibility to the world’s CHWs.
Digital maps are an essential tool used to collect data, share it openly and flexibly, and visualize patterns related to our key questions and concerns as they occur anywhere on the surface of the earth. What types of healthcare services exist in areas with the greatest health risk? Where are the largest gaps in service provision? What sorts of issues – from road infrastructure to difficult terrain to population densities to inequities in health spending – might be correlated with gaps in services? How do health programs compare to one another in terms of levels of training, equipment used, and access to medicines?
By storing relevant information to answering these questions in rich, open online repositories that are connected to digital web mapping tools, such as the 1mCHW Campaign’s Operations Room, we can enable far greater insight, distributed among far more people than ever before. We can link different types of data in GIS layers to lend inferential reasoning and contextual analytics, enabling people – from program managers, to policy makers, to health workers – to think across different dimensions of complex problems like epidemiology and health workforce needs all at the same time. This synthetic reasoning comes to life through interactive graphics that can easily be shared across the internet. As a result, we can prompt more people than ever before to contribute their insight and energy to helping solve the world’s crisis of access to healthcare.
Users of the Operations Room mapping applications can also now access a new Esri story map, titled A Day in the Life: Snapshots from 24 Hours in the Lives of Community Health Workers, which uses photos and text that are tied to specific geographic locations throughout sub-Saharan Africa to tell the story of one long day across the lives of different CHWs providing care to millions of people. Esri story maps are a new type of narrative medium, in which cartography is tightly integrated with other media forms and visualization tools. In our case, this new medium helps to draw attention to the everyday texture and beauty of healthcare delivery at the community level. Contextual and synthetic data analysis is critically important to understand how and why problems, risks, and solutions may exist, and how they may be connected to one another. But analytics can often miss the micro level at which human lives are actually lived. This CHW story map brings that human dimension into focus, and lets users join the very personal journey to provide life-saving care to the most vulnerable people on earth.
About The Author
Andrew Schroeder is the Director of Research and Analysis at Direct Relief. He specializes in geographic information systems (GIS) for humanitarian operations and global public health. Andrew and Direct Relief were recognized in 2013 for this work with the President’s award from Esri, and again in 2015 with Esri’s special achievement in GIS award. Andrew is currently engaged in a wide range of projects, from the evaluation of global drug donation programs to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for disaster response to the deployment of GIS tools to track and count community health workers to the implementation of spatial analysis in the national laboratory systems of Ethiopia and Indonesia.
