Hello. This is Bill Breeger, and welcome to our course training and learning programs for volunteer community health workers. We hope those of you who are actually working in Asia, Latin America, Rural America, Africa. On training community volunteers will find this particularly useful. But of course anyone who is working with a volunteer program of any kind can use the lessons from this course. We are going to be talking about the example of volunteer community health workers throughout the course. But as I said, you can imagine other kinds of volunteers that you may be working with. But the volunteer CHWs are an important component of involving communities in their own health service delivery. This is in keeping with the primary healthcare concept that was enshrined in the Ama Ata Declaration in [INAUDIBLE] 1978. During the course, all of you will be guided through the concepts and the steps for planning training and continuing education for village volunteers. And this will be now very much in line with the concepts of adult education. These basic concepts, and steps, as I've said, can be applied to any kind of volunteer program. We have 10 major sections of this course, and as we said they'll build step by step, so helping you create. A training program. But first we want to start off, looking at adult education. Recognizing that the village volunteers come with a wealth of knowledge and we want to build on that. We want to discuss how to identify and recruit trainees, working together with people in the village, the village leaders, the village members. Once have a clear idea of who the trainees are, we need to figure out what their learning needs are. So, diagnosing those needs of the village volunteers, and of course, in the context of what the village needs for people to do and programs, public health programs, that they may be working on. Based on this determination of training needs we will set learning objectives. So again, the objectives follow directly from finding out what people need to learn. Then the process goes on to match those objectives with appropriate learning methods and resources. Resources in particular include the trainers, include any kinds of materials and supplies that the trainees are going to use during demonstrations. Includes planning logistics, the training venues, the time and other kinds of logistical concerns. We'll walk through the process of implementing the training program, what to look for in terms of helping it run smoothly. Then we'll also provide. A sample lesson, for training village health workers in malaria case management. We'll next talk about evaluation and follow-up. We want to make sure that the evaluation goes back to looking at the diagnostic process. How did We learn about the training needs, how can we measure those like, for example, a pre-test and then a post-test at the end to see what has happened. And again, our objectives guiding us through to the end as a road map. And finally, after training we need to make sure learning doesn't stop. We need to talk about supervision mechanisms and continuing education methods for the volunteers. During the course, we will have several different assignments, basically in two categories. We will have the peer assessment and this will be done in three stages. Where you will actually develop simple planning matrix for your training that looks at the objectives, the methods, the resources, and the evaluation. And then there will also be three quizzes that are 10 points each. One thing we want to stress is that even though we are talking about volunteers, the main focus in not on the individual volunteer, but on the whole community. What we aim for in these community health worker programs is actually for the community to take responsibility, take charge of its own health planning and intervention. They may choose volunteers, the community does, and they may choose more or less as they need. They may replace them as the case may be, but the community needs to take responsibility in making sure the program runs smoothly. So we want to be sure that again, any kind of volunteer activity is integrated into the community activities itself. Ultimately, we want to support both the community and the volunteers to ensure that the program is sustained. Again, what we're looking at is these volunteers extend health care out into the grass roots. And we want to make sure that they continue to work, that the community continues to take responsibility for its volunteers. So the health system, the local health clinics, the local district health team can guide the community, and the volunteers, in the technical aspects of the program. But we also want to stress that volunteers in this particular case are not working for the health system, they're not working for the clinic. They are accountable to their own communities for delivering the services that the communities want and need. So once this accountability is built in, and the community takes charge of selecting and supporting their volunteers, then the program can be sustained because it doesn't rely on just one or two individual people. So ultimately during the course we want to stress this goal of community and clinic partnership. We hope you enjoy the course and are able to apply some of the concepts in your own work.
