Author’s Opinion: Community Health is Rapidly Expanding, Training New Workers Is Critical
In every region of the United States there exists elements of the healthcare system embedded within a local community. But there is a burgeoning industry that sits between healthcare and the community aptly named Community Health.
Jones and Bartlett Learning Senior Marketing Manager Susanne Walker sat down with Kay Perrin, author of, “Working in Community Health: Foundations for a Successful Career,” who discussed what it means to be a community health worker, how this field is growing, and how this exciting industry bridges the gap between healthcare and the community.
Watch the interview and read the Q&A below to learn more about Perrin’s view views on the importance of training people to become community healthcare workers.
Q: What does a community health worker do, and why is this work important?
Kay Perrin: They can have multiple roles depending on the region of the United States. I like to think of them as the liaison between the community and the healthcare system. For example, if you have a physician that is new in town and working at a federally qualified healthcare center, they may not be familiar with the culture or language of the community. The community healthcare worker knows the culture, knows the language and can serve as that bridge for understanding and translating in some cases what is going on.
This is really important for healthcare compliance, because oftentimes, the provider will give instructions and send the patient on their way and that patient will come back in a couple weeks and be frustrated because they didn’t understand the directions.
Q: Is there a growing need for community healthcare workers? If so, why?
Perrin: Yes. Most of the growth is in the southwest portion of the United States: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. There reason for that is the influx of workers coming from Central, South America and Mexico to that area.
In the Southeast they’re becoming more popular, but we also need to look globally. Community health workers are very important in many of the rural and tribal areas of Africa and India. They’re doing fantastic work globally also.
Q: What are some of the various titles or roles of community health workers?
Perrin: They could be called health navigators, community health navigators, liaisons, community health educators, community workers. There is an overlap with the discipline of nursing because nursing also has nursing navigators, and nursing health educators. I would say that community health workers jobs and titles are defined by their specific location. It could vary from state to state or clinic to clinic in the same community.
Q: What kind of training is needed to become a community health worker?
Perrin: That’s kind of up for grabs. Some training is completely on the job. Some of it is a career ladder, such as a certified nursing assistant (CNA), and there is a certification, but it varies by state. That’s one of the primary reasons for writing this book, to try to get it all on the same page and hopefully one day to see a national certification.
Q: Who did you write this book for?
Perrin: I wrote it for a community college audience, it’s easy to understand. I tried to cover a vast array of information they would need. I looked at all of the various state certifications and looked at their competencies. I tried to cover the vast majorities of the common competencies among all of the states so that it wouldn’t be state specific, but it would be a composite of everything you would need to know and take a state certification exam.
Q: Your text focuses on skills and training of community health workers. Can you explain what that is and how your book is different from other textbooks on the market?
Perrin: We did a search and didn’t find any that were an exact match with the topics covered in this book, which was one of the reasons to go forward with writing the book. I give a background of community healthcare workers not only in the United States but globally. Throughout the book I inserted medical terms, with the definition embedded in the text so as they’re reading they’d learn medical terminology. This is so the student is at least familiar with the most common types of medical terms they would need to know.
I went on to talk about what is an acute disease and what is a chronic disease giving definitions and examples using the 10 leading causes of death as a model.
I have included case studies throughout the book to illustrate how this information would work for a community health worker. In those case studies I gave jobs community health workers would actually be doing and what that work might feel like. As they read it, they can think, “Is that something I would want to do?” or “I’m not sure if I would be comfortable doing this.”
I try to give a realistic view of what that looks like for community healthcare workers, so they don’t go through a full training program only to find out it’s not what they thought it was.
Also, I added an entire chapter on environmental impact on health as well as chapters on working with the elderly as well as end-of-life care.
Q: What advice do you have for anyone looking to work in community health?
Perrin: Mostly, do they have the personality to want to help people? This is a really “help people” kind of job. If they’ve been working in a hospital or clinic setting, they may be ready to go to a new career, even at 40 or 50 years old.