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UT Health San Antonio was recently awarded $3 million by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to build up the community health worker workforce in South Texas.
The three-year grant will train 275 new community health workers and support recertification efforts for 75 current community health workers. Dr. Jason Rosenfeld, the director of Global Health Education for the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics UT Health San Antonio, explained that these workers are critical for local communities.
“They’ve served vital roles within health care systems as what we sometimes call patient care coordinators or patient navigators, helping individuals oftentimes from lower income and more marginalized communities, just kind of navigate the health care systems, navigate their primary care visits, sometimes assist with care coordination,” he said.
The grant is part of a nearly $230 million national effort by the federal government to bolster public health services at the local level.
During COVID-19, Rosenfeld said many community health workers began doing contract tracing work and education about the disease and vaccines for the communities that already trusted them.
“They’ve really been that community liaison at a time when we as public health professionals really needed to be as close to community as possible,” he said.
Community health workers are able to be a trusted liaison because they are often from the same places and speak the same languages as the people they work with. Because rural communities often have the least access to health care, Rosenfeld said his team is focusing on training community health workers in rural South Texas counties.
“And along the Rio Grande Valley border region, what we hope to really achieve with this program is to expand the workforce primarily among the rural counties from Bear County out to Laredo and then down to Brownsville,” Rosenfeld said. “Those are the areas that are medically underserved, and they don’t have as great a representation of the workforce.”
Rosenfeld said his team will also work with local partners to ensure that there are jobs waiting for the newly trained health workers in these rural communities, so that they can make a living as they serve their communities.
While being a community health worker is a career for some, Rosenfeld said that it’s a great bridge for others who are going into nursing or other career fields in public health.
“I think for many people, it becomes a career,” he said. “I’ve seen many folks who have higher-degree training, whether it’s in nursing or public health, also get themselves certified as community health workers because it gives them another set of skills and it validates work that they may have been doing previously, that didn’t get recognized because of specific titles or certifications.”
In South Texas, some of those who have been doing the work without the recognition are “promotores de salud,” or health promoters, who Rosenfeld wants to target for official certification so they can make a living off of the work they’re already doing.
All 275 community health workers will be trained within three years, but Rosenfeld wants the work his team does to last longer than the grant.
“The real goal of this grant, like I said, is to not only increase the workforce but really raise awareness among employers as well as policymakers about the vital role that CHWs play so that we don’t have to continue funding their salaries through short-term grant opportunities but baking these into those public health and social services health care systems,” he said.