Authors: Atkinson JA, Vallely A, Fitzgerald L, Whittaker M, Tanner M.
Community engagement and participation has played a critical role in successful disease control and elimination campaigns in many countries. Despite this, its benefits for malaria control and elimination are yet to be fully realized. This paper reports the findings of an atypical systematic review of 60 years of literature in order to arrive at a more comprehensive awareness of the constructs of participation for communicable disease control and elimination and provide guidance for the current malaria elimination campaign. The current global malaria elimination campaign calls for a health systems strengthening approach to provide an enabling environment for programmes in developing countries. In order to realize the benefits of this approach it is vital to provide adequate investment in the ‘people’ component of health systems and understand the multi-level factors that influence their participation. The challenges of strengthening this component of health systems are discussed, as is the importance of ensuring that current global malaria elimination efforts do not derail renewed momentum towards the comprehensive primary health care approach. It is recommended that the application of the results of this systematic review be considered for other diseases of poverty in order to harmonize efforts at building ‘competent communities’ for communicable disease control and optimising health system effectiveness.
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Resource Topic: CHW Role, Community Health Workers/Volunteers, Community Involvement, Human Resources Management/Workforce Development, Malaria, Millineum Development Goals/MDG and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Scale-up
Resource Type: Evaluation, Journal articles, Research
Year: 2011
Region:
Country: Global
Publisher May Restrict Access: No
