Evaluating community health worker performance in India

Abstract

In 1977 the Government of India launched a health care experiment in which volunteers were used to provide a basic health care service. Community health workers have also been used in many small, non-governmental programmes. Although much has been said about the selection and training of such workers, there have been very few attempts to evaluate their actual work performance. This paper makes the plea for more, regular evaluations of their activities by those involved in the programmes: communities, supervisors and health workers themselves. Such evaluations are useful even if they are only done on a small scale. What is described here is a small study of the performance of part-time community health workers (PTCHWs) in a programmme initiated in 1977 by the Community Health Department of the Christian Medical College in Vellore, South India. It concludes that the PTCHWs with the highest performance scores have, on the whole, less education, more experience, less population to cover and more intense supervision.