Centre for African Family Studies

The Health Extension Program (HEP) launched in 2003 by the Federal Ministry of Health is an innovative community based program with the aim of creating healthy environment and living condition by making community based health services available at the grass root level.  Under the Sub – Sahara African (SSA) project, CAFS/ Ethiopia’s Country Office has taken the initiative to support the Health Extension Workers (HEW). To this effect the CO has undertaken communication need assessment of the HEWs.

Most of the literature related to the Health Extension Program has been reviewed by CAFS and through this review; the necessary tools needed to conduct the data collection have been developed.  The tools and instruments developed featured interviews, a focus group discussion guide and checklist, and a semi-structured questionnaire.  Data has been collected from the HEW’s and their respective supervisors, Health bureau heads and model families. Assessments were carried out in four districts within the Oromia region and the Amhara regional states, Ethiopia and a total of 40 HEW’s were used. Additionally, two heads from the Woreda Health Bureau were used for the study and focus group discussions were conducted amongst eight model families. Once the assessments had been carried out, the country office set aside half a day to share the assessment findings during a consultative meeting. HEWs and supervisors, field office staff from EPHA Addis and Oromiya Health Bureau attended the consultative meeting providing feedback and other essentials suggestions to incorporate in the manual. The needs assessment report has been completed and includes all the propositions made during the consultative meeting.

The assessment finding revealed that, there is a lot to be desired on the communication capacity of the HEWs in effectively communicating the health messages of the packages at the family level. HEWs efforts to involve families to actively engage in in-depth discussion, exploring and analyzing their health concerns wasn’t at all practiced. The development of Family dialogue communication skill manual with participatory tools and techniques to bridge identified communication skill gaps will therefore be a great contribution for the success of the program. The Family Dialogue Skill manual will focus on health extension program components and enable HEWs to effect behavior changes among the rural families with respect to disease control, family planning and environmental sanitation. The country office has already been involved on manual development and to be finalized in the near future.