Community Health Workers: Describing the Breadth of Interventions and Contexts Across the World

Social inequalities in health remain a challenging problem throughout the world. Despite a variety of specific contexts, vulnerable populations often present to care later with more advanced health problems, and often greater fatality rates, at younger ages. To remediate this, health services NGOs project personnel to liaise with the communities and serve as an intermediary between health professionals and patients from vulnerable populations. The denominations may vary (health mediation, cultural mediation, community health workers, Agente de Saúde…) and sometimes entail different functions. Hard evidence on the impact of these “mediators” is often lacking because of the differences in contexts, specific health problems considered, and what “mediation” entails in different countries.

In this Research Topic, we encourage submissions of articles that describe a range of experiences for different contexts where “mediation” (health mediation, cultural mediation, community health workers, Agente de Saúde…) programmes are deployed for public health issues. From this variety of experiences we hope this special issue will constitute a precious repository of experiences and contexts that could be transferable and scalable interventions for others.