Community Health Workers Geographical Placement in Haiti

The demand for geographic information systems (GIS) and related tools is increasing among public health decision-makers, as the utility is being recognized and both methodological innovations and computational capacity evolve. Simulation studies of optimal geographical placement scenarios for health services, including community health workers, have been developed to inform programmatic decisions related to the size of catchment areas and to identify where there are coverage gaps and/or priority areas for scale-up.

In 2019-2020, the AIM group provided support to the Haitian strategic plan on community health by providing scenarios for optimized geographical community health worker placement, accounting for travel time, population density and health facility locations.

The Swiss TPH team developed geospatial tools to combine high-resolution maps with optimisation algorithms to provide optimized CHW placement scenarios, accounting for realistic travel time, population density and existing health facilities. The model is publicly available as an R package that the use can apply on their own data.

Additional information are available in a dedicated publication. An initial summary of the work was presented during the annual meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) in 2018.

Involved Regions: Latin America and Caribbean
Involved Countries: Haiti

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