“Every House a Health Post” Program: A modern approach to facilitate the peoples participation in promoting community health

The “Every House a Health Post” Program seeks to expand the conscious participation of the people in the field of providing, maintaining and promoting health in all homes of the country. In this program, one person in each family is trained as a "Health Ambassador" and is empowered to take care of the health of themselves, their family and community. Training and empowerment of family health ambassadors is done by the healthcare workers team in health service delivery units.

Report from: Zahedan University of Medical Sciences, Vice Chancellery for Health
Published on: 18 September 2020

In this program, the Health Ambassador promotes health knowledge and personal skills, conveys information and health knowledge received to family members and friends, observes a healthy lifestyle by themselves an, and their family.

General purpose of the program:

Empowering the individuals, families and community to ensure, maintain and promote heal through promoting self-care and collective cooperation and participation in public health activities. Socializing health, providing, maintaining and promoting people"s health level is the general goal of the program

Specific objectives:

Training a Health Ambassador for each household

Training of a Community Health Volunteer (CHV) per every 15-20 Health Ambassadors

Training one student Community Health Volunteer per every 10 households

Health Ambassador (HA): In each household, a person who is literate is selected as the Health Ambassadors of that family and our liaison with that family. These people are recruited by phone calls made by health care providers or by visiting the family in person. The details of the applicant"s health ambassadors are registered by health care providers in the Integrated Health System known as SIB. After the selection of the Health Ambassadors, training on various public health subjects will be carried out via virtual or in- person training sessions. Health Ambassadors play a role in implementing interventions for prevention, initial treatment, rehabilitation, and conscious referral to service delivery units.

Community Health Volunteer (CHV): A Community Health Volunteer (CHV) is a health ambassador who is active and resident in the neighborhood who works with health care providers to train health ambassadors. For every 15 to 20 health ambassadors, one person is selected and trained as a Community Health Volunteer.

The program started as a pilot project in December, 2019 in three universities of Semnan, Qazvin and Hamedan. Due to the success of the program, in June 2020 the program was expanded throughout the country.

The most important training courses subjects for Health Ambassadors (HA) and Community Health Volunteers (CHVs)

The training courses held for ambassadors are in three areas of health prevention and promotion, primary treatment and rehabilitation.

1- Health promotion and prevention

Coronavirus disease self-care, depression self-care, healthy aging, physical activity, healthy eating, smoking prevention, oral health, family preparedness for disasters

2- Providing primary treatments

Primary treatment of burns, trauma, bleeding, carbon monoxide poisoning, chest pain, emergency 115 help, manual cardiac resuscitation…..etc.

3- Providing rehabilitation services

Prevention of musculoskeletal problems, movement training in people with disabilities due to spinal cord injuries, diabetic foot care, prevention of falls in the elderly

Some of the training methods in this program include face-to-face training, group training, distance learning using e-learning systems, and mass media.

Community Health Volunteer program is one of the successful programs run by Zahedan University of Medical Sciences (ZAUMS) for more than 20 years. Since the start of the “Every House a Health Post” Program in ZAUMS more than 233 thousand Health Ambassadors and more than 16 thousand Community Health Volunteers have been recruited and we are aiming for a 100% household coverage of this program in the near future.