Free Southeast course certifying public health workers fills up

Has COVID-19 increased your desire to help others?

If you answered “yes” to that question, you may be interested in Southeast Missouri State University’s free community health worker (CHW) certification course. Tuition and textbook fees have been waived for the course, which is part of a university grant through the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

“A CHW is kind of a hybrid,” said Christy Mershon, interim director of the Economic and Business Engagement Center and Continuing Education at Southeast. “It’s not really a health care profession and it’s not really a social work profession. It’s really more of a navigational profession.”

One of the bigger misconceptions about the CHW course is it trains people to work in a hospital, Mershon said by phone Monday. While CHWs can work in hospitals, they may also work in settings such as outreach, patient navigation systems or peer counseling environments, and may become promoters in community settings, health aids in schools or health advocates, according to www.engage.semo.edu. 

Southeast’s CHW course offers participants more instruction on health issues such as diabetes, hypertension and high blood pressure, which Mershon said have been identified as target areas by DHSS. But sometimes, the duties performed by a CHW might look more like helping a person find transportation resources or making phone calls to other community health workers. 

“It’s kind of like networking on steroids,” Mershon said, noting CHWs can help solidify a resource network that may already exist but isn’t formally established. “ ... We could have 15 people who live in Cape Girardeau, and when we ask them to compile community resource lists and come in and share them with each other, they’ve all got very different lists. And most of the time, they don’t know the other resources exist.”

In the past, Southeast instructors have struggled to fill a CHW course, Mershon said. But thanks to the pandemic, there has been a higher level of interest this time around. 

“We are inordinately full,” she said. “But we actually just turned off the registration because we have 30 participants.”

Anyone with a high school diploma or GED certificate is welcome to apply for the next cohort, Mershon said, noting the course could be offered again as soon as this summer. The funding is there, she said, but noted some instructors prefer to offer face-to-face instruction, which may only be an option for fall courses, depending on the status of the coronavirus pandemic come summertime.

Instruction for the recently-filled course will be offered remotely, Mershon said. In order to earn the CHW certificate, program participants must have 100 hours of curriculum instruction and 60 hours of observation.

The idea behind the program, Mershon said, is to create more CHW workers and train people throughout the Southeast Missouri region so they can be embedded in sub-communities and reach people who may otherwise not have access to important resources. 

This is the fifth year the CHW course is being offered at Southeast, Mershon said. The idea behind the course stems from a World Health Organization model, she said.

“Think of like a World Health Organization medical encampment set up in the Amazonian jungle,” Mershon said. “They would have all of these services, but they really struggled to get villagers to come and use the services because they didn’t understand what these health encampments were, they didn’t understand what the services were, maybe the doctor spoke a different language. So there was this real disconnect.” 

One of the more effective methods WHO identified as a solution to this problem, Mershon said, was to train a trusted community leader who could then act as a “navigator” to help connect people to health care services. 

In the same way, Mershon said a CHW can bring another level of trust between individuals and health care systems.

A present-day example, Mershon said, might be a pregnant woman who has substance use disorder but is not likely to visit her local health department for help. 

“[The woman] might, however, talk to someone at their Al-Anon meeting or what have you,” she said. “And that person then might be in a position to be able to help them. There’s an inherent trust that you have on a person-to-person or a community level that doesn’t always exist between us and systems. And that’s really what this [CHW course] is designed to target.”

The course costs between $1,500 and $1,800 per person to administer, Mershon said, but the university will offer the CHW program for free as long as Southeast continues to receive money from the state.

For more information about the next CHW course, visit www.engage.semo.edu/coned/chw. For an overview of CHW curriculum, visit www.health.mo.gov/professionals/community-health-workers/curriculum.php.