Bridging the equity gap in maternal and child health: Lay health workers may help bridge equity gap in maternal and child health

doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7520.844-a

BMJ 2005;331:844 (8 October), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7520.844-a

Letter

Bridging the equity gap in maternal and child health

Lay health workers may help bridge equity gap in maternal and child health

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—As Bhutta has noted,¹ ensuring that human resourcesin health services are appropriate remains a problem in manylow and middle income countries. The renewed interest in communityor lay health worker programmes is partly a result of this,and also of the growing understanding of the important rolesthat lay people can have in supporting treatment and care forpeople with HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and many other chronic illnesses.

To my knowledge, a recently completed Cochrane systematic reviewof the effects of lay health workers in primary and communityhealth care is the first attempt to summarise the global evidencefrom randomised controlled trials on the effectiveness of suchinterventions.² Based on 43 trials, it shows that deploymentof such workers shows promising benefits—for example,in promoting immunisation uptake and improving outcomes foracute respiratory infections and malaria—when comparedwith usual care. It also highlights a wide range . . . [Full text of this article]