Provision of Equipment
The community health workers are provided with different tools
and materials from government of Rwanda and different partners local and
international witch help them to accomplish their tasks. They have Arthemeter
Lumefatrin (Primo) for treatment of Malaria and rapid diagnosis test (RDT) to
confirm Malaria; they have amoxicillin for pneumonia with a timer to count
respiratory frequency, zinc and oral rehydration solution (ORS) against
diarrhea and RUTF for malnutrition.
There are equipped also with monitoring and evaluation tools
for data recording and reporting with innovation of Rapid SMS with cell phones
for tracking the first 1,000 days of life, preventing unnecessary mother and
new born death in Rwanda. They have also boots, torches and radios. The cell
coordinator has bicycles, MOH, Rwanda (2011).
Community health workers need access to the proper equipment
and supplies to deliver expected services. This requires procurement of
supplies on a regular basis to avoid any substantial stock out periods.
Community must be equipped with a steady stock out of supplies and commodities
needed for their day to day operations.
Community health workers also need materials to support their
mobility, with reliable and safe transportation between households (such as an
umbrella or bicycles as appropriate in a given context) and backpacks for
supplies (Lehmann et al. 2007).
Community health training and deployment without immediate
continuous and reliable supplies to accomplish task is inefficient demotivating
and damaging to community health workers credibility (Lehmann et al. 2007).
Therefore, a functional community health workers system
requires a robust supply management chain, with a keen eye to transport and
drug supply, as well as reliable supply chains for all other equipment required
by community health workers to perform their job functions. Reliable and
sustainable supply chain systems are a challenge for large scale primary health
care and community health programs in general (WHO, 2010).
In Pakistan, each lady health worker should have a supply kit
that includes contraceptives and essential drugs in order to perform her work.
These community health workers are resupplied each month at their local clinics
(Muhamood et al. 2010).
A research conducted in Rwanda on community based provision of
family planning services revealed that one of the major barriers mentioned by
CHWs and supervisors was the difficulty of keeping all the required materials
in stock. CHWs reported that since they receive only 2 - 3 units of each method
of family planning that they sometimes quickly ran out of stock. CHWs often
live far from the HC that resupplies them. CHWs are required to go to the HC to
retrieve commodities and consumables but they are not given a means of
transport (Rwanda Ministry of Health, 2011).
In Zambia, a large community health worker program in Kalabo
District almost completely collapsed. Key reasons identified were a shortage of
drugs and community health workers' selection criteria. Furthermore, the
authors found that the community members in charge of CHWs selection knew
little about selection criteria. Further quality of supervision was poor and in
50% cases nonexistent (Stekelenburg et al. 2003).
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