How to measure the quality of household visits by community health workers in Kenya?
Thursday, 22 Nov 2018
“Through the administration of the Community Follow Up Tool, it’s something that you can use to get data to quantify the quality of services given at the community level. Secondly, it is something that you can use that data to make informed decisions.” Community Health Extension Worker and Quality Improvement team leader, Nairobi County
Quality improvement initiatives aim to measure and improve health outcomes, and tend to be focused on (easier to measure) facility-based, curative care. In the USAID SQALE program, we have taken these principles to the community level of the health system.
We introduced a Community Follow Up Tool to our program to get household perspectives on the Community Health Volunteers’ work. Data was collected, door-to-door, by community members. They received half a day's training on the tool and were paid for their time.
The tool increased accountability and ownership by involving community members in data collection. This tool has been tested as a ’rapid assessment’ approach for Quality Improvement teams in Kenya. There is widespread acceptance of its utility from national to community levels.