Save Lives in the World's Most Remote Villages

Naomi works as one of Liberia’s 3,800 community health workers. As a Community Health Assistant (CHA), she provides essential, lifesaving care to her neighbors in a remote community in Grand Bassa County. Since 2016, Last Mile Health has collaborated with the Ministry of Health and partners to design and scale the National Community Health Assistant Program to deploy teams of community and frontline health workers to rural communities across the country, reaching 1.2 million people.

Every community health worker receives training and supplies, is connected to a clinical supervisor at the closest facility, and most importantly, is paid for the lifesaving services they provide to their neighbors. Forced to drop out of school due to her financial status, Naomi is now able to make a living through employment as a CHA. Many like her are able to support themselves and their families through this successful government-led program. 

Since the program’s launch, community and frontline health workers have carried out over 4.2 million home visits; treated and/or screened 1.2 million childhood cases of pneumonia, malaria, diarrhea and malnutrition; and identified over 5,192 potential epidemic events.

As the world faces increases in the number of reported COVID-19 cases, Last Mile Health continues to place the utmost importance on protecting frontline health workers who despite the pandemic, have continued to provide health care to remote communities who cannot access traditional points of care. 

To ensure that community and frontline health workers can keep serving safely, Last Mile Health has been working closely with the Ministry of Health in Liberia to procure and distribute personal protective equipment. Since the start of the pandemic, Last Mile Health has supported the Ministry to quantify, procure, and distribute critical supplies for community and frontline health worker training, as well as design and deliver a comprehensive COVID-19 curriculum focused on prevention measures, case detection and response, and protocols for ‘no touch’ delivery of primary healthcare services in remote communities. 

Naomi emphasizes that “It is important to use PPE because [..] it also protects the CHA. You have to use PPE to protect yourself in the community because you don’t know who you are going around.” Naomi cares deeply about the work she is doing in her community and remains an advocate for the program. When asked what she would share with someone who was interested in becoming a CHA, Naomi quickly responds: “I will tell them the work is good […] I will explain it to them, the importance of the work.”

LMH is committed to meeting workers like Naomi’s critical protective needs to ensure they can continue their vital role in safely providing health services to the world’s most remote communities.

During the West African Ebola outbreak, Last Mile Health learned that a coordinated response effort led by government partners to deploy community health workers can successfully and safely help to prevent, detect, and respond to epidemic events. Last Mile Health and Liberia’s Ministry of Health are now working to mobilize a programmatic response to the COVID-19 pandemic that ensures community and frontline health workers are prioritized as critical to response efforts, prepared with the training and tools they need, and supported to ensure patients have uninterrupted access to care. 

Last Mile Health began supporting Liberia’s COVID-19 prevention and response efforts in January 2020, which have accelerated as the country’s cases have continued to rise, including by more than double in the last few weeks. Building on a long-standing partnership with the Ministry of Health, Last Mile Health is collaborating with a coalition of partners to train and equip over 4,000 community health workers and supervisors to fight COVID-19 and continue providing access to essential health services at the last mile. 

With community health workers in place carefully screening and referring sick patients to the health facility, it is vital that the first line of clinical defense - nurses and physician assistants in rural health facilities - are also empowered to continue serving safely. Last Mile Health is now training clinicians and support staff from clinics across four counties on Infection Prevention & Control protocols while also supplying the personal protective equipment they need to continue providing primary health care services. Comfort King-Gbaie is a Quality Assurance Coordinator for the Ministry of Health’s Quality Management Unit. She is overseeing Infection Prevention & Control for the COVID-19 response and recently facilitated a Training of Trainers in Montserrado County, where the majority of cases have been identified. These clinicians then returned to their respective health facilities where they were empowered to pass on what they had learned: 

“By tomorrow [these facilitators] will start their training at health facilities in Montserrado and we expect that all that we've taught today will be shared with those in the facilities as well to make sure that we all can keep safe while we are serving. ” 

In this time of crisis, Last Mile Health will continue to focus on empowering healthcare workers to invest in their communities by ensuring their safety. Now more than ever, it is important we must come together to ensure that there is a health worker within reach of everyone, everywhere.