Executive Director of Survey Research Bittie Behl-Chadha, Senior Biostatistician Pei-Pei Lei, and Biostatistician Diane Brown, experts from ForHealth Consulting’s Office of Survey Research, co-authored the article Evaluating the impact of community health worker certification in Massachusetts: Design, methods, and anticipated results of the Massachusetts community health worker workforce survey for Frontiers in Public Health on January 12, 2023.
The article was co-authored with other experts from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Office of Statistics and Evaluation, Bureau of Community Health and Prevention; the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Office of Community Health Workers, Bureau of Community Health and Prevention; the Division of Health Protection and Promotion, Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Bureau of Community Health and Prevention; Mass General Brigham; the Division of Community-Based Prevention and Care, Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Bureau of Community Health and Prevention; and the Department of Public Health Sciences, College of Medicine, Medical University of South Carolina.
Article Background: Professional certification of community health workers (CHWs) is a debated topic. Although intended to promote CHWs, certification may have unintended impacts given the grassroots nature of the workforce. As such, both intended effects and unintended adverse effects should be carefully evaluated. However, there is a lack of published literature describing such effective evaluations with a robust methodology. In this methods paper, the authors describe a key component of evaluating CHW certification in Massachusetts-the Massachusetts CHW Workforce Survey.