Community Animal Health Workers (CAHW) are key members of the global workforce, trained to provide basic animal health services in rural and underserved areas that may be resource thin when it comes to availability of veterinarians and veterinary paraprofessionals. However, the challenge for CAHWs has been insufficient dedicated training, the training and regulation that exists is not harmonized within and between countries, absence of agreed-upon curriculum, coordination between stakeholders, and a lack of common nomenclature leading to inconsistent performance.
New Competency and Curriculum Guidelines for Community Animal Health Workers, recently released by the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), will serve to enhance their skills, effectiveness and integration within the veterinary workforce ensuring they will be well equipped to provide essential animal healthcare, such as vaccinations, deworming and first aid. These guidelines aim to ensure a common set of core competencies and provide a framework that enable veterinary statutory bodies or the appropriate regulatory agency to assess CAHWs’ qualifications and create a system for regulation and licensing.
The Ohio State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine faculty and trainees provided technical assistance in the development of the CAHW guidelines, participated in ad hoc group meetings, providing insights and best practices in curriculum design and assessment. The project team included Armando Hoet, professor and director, Veterinary Public Health program; Amanda Berrian, associate professor and Global One Health initiative (GOHi) director of education and training capacity; Ivana Grozdic, assistant director of Research and Graduate Studies; and Andrea Bessler and Alice Matos, veterinary public health residents.
“Training, outreach, and community engagement are central pillars of the College of Veterinary Medicine’s strategic plan, as well as GOHi, our institutional framework for One Health,” Berrian said. “Through activities and collaborations like these, we are helping to strengthen global veterinary capacity and build a robust One Health workforce that includes veterinarians, veterinary paraprofessionals, community animal health workers, as well as those who train this vital workforce.”
The scope of CAHW’s work can vary between countries, but they are particularly relevant in African and Asian countries where they play an important role in ensuring food safety, preventing and controlling zoonotic diseases and raising awareness of antimicrobial resistance.
Understanding the importance of these critical workers to developing countries, the team is now developing an online tool to assess the alignment of the curriculum implemented by CAHW training institutions with the WOAH competency framework to help identify gaps and strengths of the training programs.
The tool is being developed based on insights from the team’s previous evaluation tool designs and a literature review on current curriculum and training assessment practices used by CAHWs. After analyzing the findings, the team decided to create a flexible, two-part tool to accommodate various training programs with different resources and interests. This tool will assess the coverage of core learning outcomes through a mapping questionnaire and evaluate the competencies acquired by CAHWs using 360-degree feedback collected from key stakeholders, including trainers, CAHWs, and their supervisors.
“By using the tool, training organizations and statutory bodies will be able to identify gaps and areas for improvement,” Matos said. “By addressing such gaps, organizations will be able to equip CAHWs with a set of core competencies that are consistent across training programs within and between countries, ultimately contributing to improved animal and public health outcomes at the local, national and global levels.”
“This project is an important step in professionalizing the CAWHs workforce worldwide,” Hoet said.