Community Health Officer-Management & Leadership Training Program

eHA works with the Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MoHS) in Sierra Leone to strengthen health delivery systems at the community level by providing a management and leadership training program (MLTP) for community health officers (CHOs). CHOs lead the MoHS initiatives at the chiefdom level and are often the first point of contact for primary care for the local population.

eHA works with the MoHS to build capacity of the CHOs to better understand the impact of using new management strategies  and leadership behaviours  to more effectively deliver good quality health services to their respective communities.
eHA also works with Emory University, ICAP, and Njala University to develop the training curriculum for the CHO MLTP as well as facilitate the training sessions during workshops. Additionally, eHA and Emory recruited four mentors based in Sierra Leone who offer on-the-job training and supportive supervision to the CHOs in the field after each workshop.
The CHOs go through a series of 4 workshops spread across 5-6 months allowing them to learn through experiences in the classroom and be able to apply them in the field through on the job training as well.

The intended outcome is to train over 200 new CHOs by June 2019 countrywide.
The CHOs are expected to be able to:

eHA’s role

• Provide onsite mentorship and supportive supervision to CHOs

• Provide logistics and technical support to MLTP workshops

• Improve their ability to use data for decision making

• Identify and be able to implement continuous quality improvement projects

• Effective Human resource management

• Conduct Health facility assessments using Service Availability and Readiness Assessment (SARA) tool

• Community Health Promotion

• Improve their interpersonal communication skills

• To effectively delegate duties and carry out supportive supervision to their supervisees

• Investigate and analyze events that lead to maternal mortality