A Guide Book for Community Health Agents

Community community Health agents in rural regions of Peru are given the task to visit new mothers in their homes to teach them healthy child-rearing practices. Most have no material at all to guide them through their home visits, while others have outdated and boring flip books or pamplets that are meant to be used during the home visits. The material some have available do not include essential messages for early childhood development, lack engaging images with modern graphic design and marketing technics, nor provide  guidelines to ensure messages are age appropriate and in a logical order. The community health workers have a crucial  role to educate mothers on healthy child-rearing practices. They deserve material that is as engaging and dynamic as they are. The book will be available to print in physical form or upload as an App for a tablet.

Child in rural regions of Peru have extremely high rates of developmental delay and chronic malnutrition. The results of such lead to poor learning capacity and lose of opportunity due to poor cognitive and physical functioning. These results are partly due to mother's poor understanding of healthy child-rearing practices. Community health agents are tasked to teach the mothers healthy practices, however, they often do not understand the drivers of poor health and development and their material does provide them with the guidance and agendas they need to follow to conduct effective health and development promotion. There have been lots of Manuels created for program coordinators to train the CHAs, however little has been done to provide the CHAs tools that include the newest innovations in behavior change science, graphic design, and early childhood development. 

The book will benefit the poorest children in rural Peru. The book has the potential to reach all of those children that receive home visits by community health agents. Community health agents exist in every region and community identified as impoverished, however, only some are active, mostly because they do not have adequate material to guide them through their tasks. On July 23rd, 2018, The Congress of Peru enacted a new law to further support the community health agents of Peru. The authorities are still trying to figure out how exactly to do that. Providing them the book we will develop is a big step in the right direction. 

Develop a guidebook for community health agents to use to guide them through there home visits. The book must include dynamic images and prompts to encourage conversation, information on the various dimensiones of creating healthy child development, and an agenda that will provide the community health agents with instructions on which topics they should discuss during each visit. Upon its completion, the book will be delivered to the Ministry of Heath and made open access for them to print and distribute the book to their community health agents.

The innovation will come in the form of the application of the newest theories of behavior change from a multidisciplinary range of experts. The guidebook will include the newest innovations discovered in the social sciences that lead to behavior change, combined with the newest technologies in art and graphic design to make the information engaging, dynamic, and inspiring. If you see the material the CHAs are currently using, you will how badly they need an innovation. 

The mothers currently have a poor understanding of the factors that are needed to ensure healthy child development (determined by my formative research). Community health agents are tasked to increase the mother's understand of healthy child-rearing practices, however, they have been unsuccessful due to their difficult in explaining health and development topics. If the CHAs have improved tools to teach the material, in the form of a digital tablet of physical book, they would be more successful at teaching health child-rearing practices. Thus, improving health and development outcomes of children. 

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University of North Carolina

Ministry of Health of Peru

Ministry of Social Inclusion and Development