The Community Health Academy's Global Classroom

The first course in this series focuses on building core knowledge, skills, and attitudes around reducing the risk of contracting and spreading COVID-19, and how to protect yourself and your community. 

Topics covered in this course include:

• Basic information on COVID-19 (i.e., where it comes from and how it spreads), 
• Vulnerable groups
• Misinformation around COVID-19
• Recognizing signs and symptoms
• Prevention strategies
• Referral and management of suspected and confirmed cases.

This course covers COVID-19 spread prevention and how you can protect yourself and your community from contracting it. The course focuses on practical ways to practice these behaviors in a variety of different contexts, including in communal spaces, at home, and at health facilities. It discusses how the community can work together to prevent outbreaks of COVID-19 and slow the spread of the disease, so that hospitals do not become overwhelmed with cases. 

It is important to note that while this course provides a generalized overview of COVID-19 prevention and protection measures that are widely applicable to a variety of contexts and circumstances, this course does not account for everything, especially as the health community is still learning day-to-day about the virus and its impact. Therefore, please use this course as a guide, and continue to familiarize yourself with your context to best customize the content we cover here for you and your community’s specific needs.

This course will cover the mental health impact of COVID-19, and how a combination of psychosocial support systems and a wellness perspective can be used to mitigate the effects of the highly disruptive, stressful, and disorienting COVID-19 pandemic. While our focus at this time may be more on physical health and wellbeing, it is vital that we do not overlook the importance of addressing mental health concerns, particularly given the potentially traumatic effect of the pandemic across communities and especially for health workers and other vulnerable populations. 

It is important to note that while this course provides a generalized overview of COVID-19’s effect on mental health and wellness, there are differences across countries and contexts. There must not be a one-size-fits-all approach to addressing the mental health and psychosocial needs of the population. Therefore, please use this course as a guide, and continue to familiarize yourself with your context in order to best customize the content we cover here for you and your community’s specific needs. 

The goal of this course is to help community-based health workers become familiar with the process and skills involved in contact tracing. In this course, we will cover the purpose of contact tracing, which involves identifying, assessing, and managing people who have been exposed to COVID-19 to prevent its transmission. We will cover the steps involved, including how to assess your contacts’ level of risk and how to provide them with the support they need.

The goal of this course is to provide community-based health workers with guidance on how to advise community members on home-based care for COVID-19. This course identifies community-based health workers as people working to address the public health of their communities (for example, community health workers, community health volunteers, health facility workers, health educators / trainers, and health project managers). 

The course will cover how to determine eligibility criteria for home-based care and isolation. We will also cover how to support people with COVID-19 in their homes if they meet these criteria, including virtual support (telehealth) and support from their caregivers.

The goal of this course is to provide community-based health workers with a comprehensive understanding of community-based surveillance and their role in it. Community-based surveillance is a rapid and effective system for monitoring your community's health during a public health crisis, such as COVID-19. It is a great way to track events and behaviors that could lead to an increase in COVID-19 cases. This course will walk you through the community-based surveillance workflow, including your responsibilities as a community-based health worker in supporting the data collection and dissemination of information during this pandemic.

As a community-based health worker, you can use risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) to encourage your community to make informed decisions and positive health behavior changes. Throughout this course we will give you an overview of the different elements of RCCE and strategies you can use during the COVID-19 pandemic to help your community stay safe and healthy.

The goal of this course is to explain how community-based health workers can deliver primary health care during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to WHO, primary health care provides comprehensive care for health needs throughout a person's life. It ranges from prevention to treatment, rehabilitation, and palliative care. Since primary healthcare is often an individual’s first point of contact with the healthcare system, it is important for your community members to receive this care. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a serious impact on primary healthcare delivery, as many health centers, clinics, and hospitals shifted their focus to the COVD-19 response.

This course introduces strategies to continue routine care visits during the pandemic, including for non-communicable diseases, family planning, sexual and reproductive health, and maternal and child health.

Despite medical and technological advances, half of the world’s population lacks access to essential health services, and over 8.9 million preventable deaths occur every year. There is an acute global shortage of health workers, a gap that will grow to 18 million by 2030. Studies show that training high-performing community health workers can help close these gaps and save more than 3 million lives annually.

This course explains the importance of political prioritization of community health — at both the country and the global level — as a prerequisite for financing and support to both launch and sustain community health programs.  

This course will provide a brief overview of costing in general, then deep-dives into community health costing in detail, with reference to a tool that has been developed by UNICEF and MSH for this purpose: the Community Health Planning and Costing Tool (CHPCT). 

This course will provide a brief overview of costing in general, then deep-dives into community health costing in detail, with reference to a tool that has been developed by UNICEF and MSH for this purpose: the Community Health Planning and Costing Tool (CHPCT). 

This course goes over the importance of a resource map and gap analyses, and they steps in conducting the analyses. The course aims to equip policy makers, funders, community health planners and managers with tools and knowledge to map stakeholders, conduct a holistic inventory of funding and determine the additional funding required for implementation. A key focus of the course series is to empower these critical actors to secure sustainable financing for their community health systems.

In this course, we hope to answer common questions raised by people seeking to understand how to track resources and how to conduct gap analysis.