Community health workers play critical role in keeping lines of communication open

Community health workers across Oklahoma have quietly worked as the backbone of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Both the Oklahoma City-County Health Department and the state Health Department shored up their workforce of community health workers during the pandemic. Whatever the next phase of the pandemic may bring, they’ll stay on the front lines of public health education.

Community health workers bridge the gap between the public and public health agencies like health departments. They’ve played many roles in Oklahoma as COVID-19 has worn on: contact tracer, vaccine educator, even focus-group facilitator.

Part of the job is also being out in public, spending time in one-on-one conversations.

Last fall, OCCHD community health workers were at Millwood High School for the Soul Bowl football game, hoping to encourage attendees to take advantage of the chance to get vaccinated against COVID-19 at the game.

“They just walked around the stadium and started talking to people like, ‘Hey, why aren't you vaccinated? Let's have a conversation about this,’” said Dominique Baradaran, who works alongside community health workers as community health engagement supervisor for OCCHD.

Especially given sometimes deep-seated vaccine hesitancy, “it's much easier for someone in the community to have a peer — someone that looks like them, talks like them — to talk about these issues,” she said.

Before the pandemic, the state Health Department didn’t have a large community health worker workforce, said Erin Turner, who works as a liaison between the Health Department’s central office and its county office staff, particularly community health workers.

For both the state Health Department and OCCHD, the focus is on hiring community health workers who are from the communities they serve and arming them with information to help and answer questions from the public.

“Having CHWs that are from the communities that we're serving is what drives our success,” Baradaran said.

For instance, if an organization asks OCCHD to connect them with a health worker who understands fears about signing up for a COVID-19 test if they’re undocumented, there’s a community health worker on staff who has a similar background.

“They’ve been through that process,” Baradaran said. “They know what those fears are. So we make sure that we’re connecting CHWs with organizations and community members that have that lived experience, so they know exactly how to walk that person through what they need to do.”

The COVID-19 response is shifting now, with cases and hospitalizations having returned to much lower levels since the omicron surge. Community health workers’ focus will shift too, leaders said.

When flu season rolls around each year, they’ll be part of educating the public about flu. Or, they might focus on high rates of sexually transmitted infections, Baradaran said.

With many Oklahomans having skipped or neglected routine health care visits during the pandemic, community health workers will work to encourage people to restart those routines or connect them with health resources, she said.

They can also play a role in helping Oklahomans eligible for Medicaid through expansion get signed up, said Turner, with the state Health Department.

“Going forward, they will still continue COVID work, but we see them as really that frontline worker that can walk community members through any kind of resources they need,” Turner said. “We have so many resources in Oklahoma, and sometimes I think they're the best kept secret because people don't know how to access them.”

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Community health workers will stay at forefront of health education