Research Study Proves Effectiveness of Health Workers

December 2020

Faculty and students from the Master of Social Work program under the Center for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, conducted a research study on the effectiveness of community health workers spreading health awareness in Dunda and Udalka villages in Uttarakhand. A neighbouring village Jagdumga was taken as a control group were there is no trained health worker.

The study showed that women residing in a village with an active Amrita SeRVe-trained community health worker give more correct responses to a health-knowledge test than women residing in a village where no such Amrita SeRVe-trained community health worker is active. This means that the Amrita SeRVe-trained community health workers effectively spread health awareness to women in their catchment area.

The health workers do this by giving health awareness classes to women’s self-help groups. However, the results have shown that inside the health worker’s catchment area, even women who are not members of such self-help groups have more health knowledge than women residing outside the health worker’s catchment area.

Link to the Malaysian Journal of Public Health Medicine.
Here is the direct link to the PDF.

The authors:
von Lieres, J. S., Abraham, A. K., & Raveendran, R. (2020). How effectively do community health workers spread health awareness via women’s self-help groups in rural India?. Malaysian Journal of Public Health Medicine, 20 (Special1), 299-304.