Opportunity

Develop new health roles beyond just traditional medical care professionals and public health providers.

Recommendation

The nation should develop new health roles for both workers and volunteers who focus on health as a value in and of itself.

We can expand the version of the community lay worker at the local level and create a new community systems worker to ensure that education, urban planning, transportation and the private sector systems all support health. The definitions of both health and community are expanding. So we will need to help train current workers in the new understanding of health as having many dimensions, such as social and spiritual health along with the common associations with physical and medical health. And the understanding of community will need to be broad to incorporate online communities of interest along with geographically and culturally based communities. We also need health strategists and integrators within the health care system to address issues in the community. Finally, we need to develop career paths for under-represented communities.

The new roles will bring skills and competencies needed to organize a community and approach health problems which are rooted in statistics and rapid learning. The skills include: 

• Awareness of local community resources
• Awareness of digital assistance resources
• Communication skills
• Sensitivity to healthy literacy – cultural, generational, community, family and spiritual content
• Needs assessment skills
• Creative financial skills to show how communities find monies for the new role
• Behavioral and motivational skills for a person-centered approach