Supervision Strategies and Community Health Worker Effectiveness in Health Care Settings

In the United States, supportive supervision is crucial to the effective integration of CHWs into institutional workflows, which is in turn fundamental to achieving the mission of health care and public health organizations. The integration of CHWs is a nuanced and contextualized endeavor in both public health and health care settings, and so too must be their supervision to optimize their contributions. During a 2019 workshop at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Population Health Improvement, a panel of CHWs, trainers, supervisors, academics, and payment-mechanism specialists pointed out that across the different contexts in which CHWs work, organizations must be ready to accommodate and support the ways in which CHWs carry out their work and be willing to rethink the manner in which they are supervised, which requires changes to traditional or historical modes of supervision in health care.