Sunday, May 11, 2025
5/11/2025
Community Health Worker Training Program - Project Overview: The project proposes to integrate the Community Health Worker (CHW) program and the Community Health Aide Program (CHAP) core curriculums to build education pathways to expand the public health workforce. Tribal leaders and Tribal health programs in our area support long-term sustainable solutions that build up our communities, create opportunities for our youth and Tribal citizens, educate our healers, and train the next generation of the workforce. We are building our public health workforce through the CHAP, a program that trains individuals from the community to provide primary care in physical, behavioral, and oral health. The CHAP is vital to expanding access to care in our Tribal communities and tackling important social determinants of health. CHAP providers of all disciplines were vital to the recent COVID-19 response. CHAP builds an accessible education ladder into the health care professions, increases access to culturally relevant, trauma-informed primary care, builds integrated primary care teams, and creates professional wage jobs in communities. Expanding CHAP to include CHWs is a straightforward and valuable expansion that will ensure a well-rounded public health delivery system. Our program primarily serves AI/AN populations, both in trainees and population served. Goals: Expand CHWs into our public health workforce through training of new CHWs. Upskill existing CHW by integrating the core CHW competencies with CHAP core curriculum for all three disciplines of providers and creating education pathways to more advanced jobs. Increase access to primary care for AI/AN communities through CHW and CHAP providers. Advance health equity and increase the number of AI/AN providers and CHW available to Tribal health programs. Our objectives include training 240 new and/or integrated CHW/CHAP providers in the areas of physical, behavioral, and oral health over 3 years, and build 2 new education partnerships across the Pacific Northwest to bring training closer to our Tribal communities. HHS/HRSA Clinical Priorities: Telehealth/Telemedicine, Childhood Obesity, Behavioral Health, Opioid Substance Use, Intimate Partner Violence, Rural Health, COVID-19, and Health Equity Project Methodology: Our project works with existing education programs and the ECHO platform to expand health workforce training in Tribal communities and strengthen our health infrastructure to meet the needs of our communities. We will centralize our health education provider programs for CHAP, other behavioral health provider training programs, and CHW within an integrated health education program called our “core curriculum.” This core curriculum will be expanded to include the core CHW competencies. Individuals who complete the integrated core curriculum will be certifiable as CHWs and will have completed the prerequisites for Community Health Aide, Behavioral Health Aide, and Dental Health Aide education programs. This will serve two purposes, first, it will expand the availability of CHWs in our region and ensure that all CHAP have basic CHW training. Second, it will set CHWs on an education pathway that will lead them to rewarding careers as primary oral, behavioral, or physical health care providers through the CHAP program. We offer the core curriculum in integrated cohorts to ensure that regardless of CHAP discipline, all future providers have exposure to the other disciplines of health care. This facilitates relationship building and understanding across health care fields.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).