What Is a Community Health Worker and How to Become One
Table of Contents
What Are Community Health Workers?
As a community health worker (CHW), you serve people in communities that have limited access to medical care. You reach out to people who are uninsured or underinsured and connect them with the medical services they need. Your job is to provide basic care for underserved people, particularly women, children, and migrant workers. Your job duties include finding treatment for minor illnesses, offering family planning services, and teaching health education like nutrition, hygiene, sanitation, and disease prevention.
How to Become a Community Health Worker
You need a bachelor’s degree in health education or a related field to become a community health worker. Since your work requires daily interactions with people from different countries, foreign language skills are helpful and often encouraged. Usually community health centers will want job seekers who are fluent in whatever languages are common in the communities they serve. Additional qualifications for jobs as a community health worker include certifications in first aid, CPR, and using an automated external defibrillator (AED).
Where Do Community Health Workers Work?
As a community health worker (CHW), your career may take you anywhere in the country or even to international destinations. There are opportunities for community health work in rural and urban communities, large metropolitan areas, and on Native American reservations. Overseas, your work may be in refugee camps or impoverished areas. The focus of your job is to serve communities that are systemically underserved by the traditional health care system. You can find CHW jobs with health care facilities, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and faith-based organizations.
Why Are Community Health Workers Important?
As a community health worker (CHW), you fill an important role in the health and social services sector. You serve as a point of contact for people who don’t have access to quality medical care or social services because of poverty, language barriers, or cultural divides. You bridge those gaps and connect people with the services they need. Your work as a CHW can have a direct positive effect on many lives.
Community Health Worker Job Description Sample
With this Community Health Worker job description sample, you can get a good idea of what employers are looking for when hiring for this position. Remember, every employer is different and each will have unique qualifications when they hire for a Community Health Worker role.
Job Summary
Our clinic is seeking a Community Health Worker to provide mental health and social services to members in the community who have limited access to medical care. In this role, you communicate with underserved people, particularly women, children, and migrant workers, in order to determine the care they need and connect them to the right services. Our ideal candidate has a bachelor's degree in health education or a related field and is bilingual or multilingual in languages that our community members speak.
Duties and Responsibilities
- Connect uninsured or underinsured community members to the mental health, medical care, and social services they need
- Provide social support and interventional counseling as needed
- Support case management efforts
- Offer family planning information and helpful resources
- Teach basic health education, such as hygiene best practices and disease prevention
- Interpret or translate information
- Perform data entry in a database
- Collect and report data to a healthcare provider or hospital as needed
Requirements and Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in health education, public health, or a related field
- Foreign language skills a plus
- Community health certification (in certain states)
- Case management skills
- Knowledge of Medicare/Medicaid
- Friendly, compassionate, and empathetic personality
- Desire to help others
