Melding Multiple Sources of Knowledge: Using Theory and Experiential Knowledge to Design a Community Health Intervention Study

News coverage, social media and protests alike tend to polarise people’s stances on abortion. Moreover, these also often reveal category slippage between ‘pro-life’ and ‘Christian’ or ‘religious,’ perpetuating the impression that to be religious is to reject abortion. Contrary to both tendencies, this article engages with abortion from a lived religion perspective. It listens to evangelical healthcare practitioners as they talk about their attitudes towards abortion. This reveals a complex picture, their ethical engagement variously taking the form of resistance, neutrality, uncertainty, compartmentalisation, change and situational negotiation, while drawing upon multiple sources of ethical authority, including their own ‘experiential knowledge.’ Having presented these complexities, the article concludes by exploring their implications. First, it considers the value of foregrounding emotion when engaging in lived religion research around ethics and controversial topics. Secondly, it suggests that combining social bioethics with emotional narratives might represent a means of communicating this complexity.

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Integrating a reproductive health framework within primary care services: The experience of the Reproductive Health Intervention Study

10.31899/rh2000.1037 ◽

2000 ◽

Keyword(s):

Primary Care ◽

Reproductive Health ◽

Intervention Study ◽

Health Intervention ◽

Policy Implications ◽

Regional Office ◽

Rural Primary Care ◽

Care Services ◽

Primary Care Services ◽

Women And Children

This paper is part of the Policy Series in Reproductive Health, which shares research undertaken by the Reproductive Health Working Group (RHWG). It describes the Reproductive Health Intervention Study, which designed and tested a model of essential reproductive health (RH) services. RHWG was established in 1988 as part of a special program on the health of women and children within the context of the family and community initiated by the Population Council’s Regional Office for the West Asia and North Africa region. The paper identifies a framework of basic service components that address RH and shows that their delivery is possible at the primary level. It gives an overview of this experience, which illustrates how the RH approach can be translated into actual service delivery at the primary care level in a developing country setting. The paper outlines the framework that was developed and tested in three rural primary care clinics in Giza, Egypt; presents the main achievements as well as challenges; and discusses the most salient policy implications.

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Community Health Workers (CHWs) as Innovators

International Journal of Healthcare Information Systems and Informatics ◽

10.4018/ijhisi.2018010102 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 15-28

Author(s):

Tyler Prentiss ◽

John Zervos ◽

Mohan Tanniru ◽

Joseph Tan

Keyword(s):

Community Health ◽

Community Health Workers ◽

Health Workers ◽

Underserved Populations ◽

Low Cost ◽

Cost Effective ◽

Well Being ◽

Grant Writing ◽

Multiple Sources ◽

Context Of Learning

Community health workers (CHWs) have a longstanding role in improving the health and well-being of underserved populations in resource-limited settings. CHWs are trusted in the communities they serve and are often able to see through solutions on community challenges that outside persons cannot. Notwithstanding, such solutions often must be low-cost, easily implementable, and permit knowledge gaps among CHWs to be filled via appropriate training. In this sense, use of cost-effective information technology (IT) solutions can be key to increasing access to knowledge for these community agents. This paper highlights insights gleaned from a pilot study performed in Detroit, Michigan with a group of CHWs in basic grant-writing training via an e-platform, the Community Health Innovator Program (CHIP). The results are discussed within the context of learning theory. It is concluded that e-platforms are necessary for CHWs to leverage knowledge from multiple sources in an adaptive environment towards addressing ever-evolving global health challenges.

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