Title : Involvement of community health workers in the control of respiratory infections
Abstract:
Pneumonia, the second leading cause of infant mortality in Côte d'Ivoire, remains unknown to the great one. Among the leading causes of environment-related child deaths, 570,000 children under 5 die from respiratory infections caused by indoor and outdoor air pollution and second-hand smoke.
Methods: The analysis of the management of the pneumonia crisis has shown that strengthening the community surveillance system remains important in the fight against pneumonia.
Community-based surveillance involves an organized and rapid collection of information from the community, which could pose a risk to public health. To do this, capacity building of a number of key actors working at the community level as close as possible to the populations has proved necessary in 113 Health Districts (SD) by the Ivorian Ministry of Health through the Community Health Directorate. Thus, the involvement of ANADER, leader of the rural world, has provided decisive support in crisis management, with its 1000 Rural Development Agents (ADR), equipped with motorcycles and covering all the villages of the IC including the camps.
Results: At the rural level, mobilization and awareness-raising activities and pneumonia control carried out by community actors made it possible to report 75437 cases of pneumonia in the community (children from 0 to 5 years) in 2022 of which 63452 children were treated with Amoxicillin in the community by CHWs either a proportion of children treated for pneumonia with Amoxicillin by AUC or 84% (DHIS2).
The intervention approach with CHWs and RDAs could be applied to other public health domains to reduce morbidity and mortality from respiratory diseases
