Resource Library

Abstract (Nov 2014)

Community health workers (CHWs) are frontline public health professionals who are known by many job titles, but they share the characteristics of being trusted and culturally responsive within the communities they serve. CHWs are included in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as health professionals who serve as members of health care teams, and a recent change to Medicaid rules allows for the possibility of reimbursement for preventive services offered by CHWs. These developments may prompt further movement toward developing training and credentialing standards for the CHW workforce. Numerous stakeholders may be interested in addressing these issues, but there is significant evidence that CHWs are both capable of and best suited for leading collaborative efforts to determine their scope of practice, developing standards for training, and advocating for policies regarding credentialing. As individual states make decisions about whether and how to regulate the CHW workforce, policies are needed to support CHW leadership in determining, in collaboration with other public health colleagues, whether standards for training and credentialing are appropriate and what these standards should be.