This project was based at King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital Research Centre, Pune in India Overview Project title: Assessment of ASHA’s workload and its determinants Acute or chronic: Chronic Based at: KEM Hospital Research Centre, Pune Start date: September 2018 End date: June 2019 Principal investigator: Anand Kawade Project team: Hilary Pinnock, Pam Smith, Uddhavi Chavan, Manisha Gore Background The Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) programme is India’s largest public-sector community health worker initiative, launched by the Government of India in 2005 to provide accessible, affordable and quality healthcare to the rural population. ASHAs serve as key facilitators of the healthcare system in India’s rural populations. ASHAs are voluntary workers, not employees, tasked with implementing a number of government health programmes at a village level. Their role has been attributed to improvements in healthcare indicators and they are increasingly seen as a significant community resource. Given their successful contribution to health care delivery, health care providers and policy makers may wish for ASHA to provide an increasing range of activities. It is essential to understand their workload before involving them in any further programmes. Aim and impact To understand how much more workload could be given to ASHAs and how much more time they could spend fulfilling these activities. The study results showed that ASHAs are moderately work-loaded. They have to prioritise between household work, other jobs and ASHA work, and face challenges like difficult commutes, poor community response, socio-cultural differences, inadequate health system support and delayed and small incentives. Despite these challenges they are happy and satisfied doing ASHA work, primarily because of the pride of doing “good” work and helping the community, which gave them social recognition and respect. Almost all of them demand for more financial stability. All of them are ready to do new work provided it is health related and will give them reasonable incentives. The findings have implications and recommendations for future policy and research. Key developments Project completed in June 2019, including analysis of study data Two publications are planned to disseminate the findings Meeting planned with the local and state health authorities to share our findings We are looking into how we can disseminate the results within the local community Publications Interplaying role of healthcare activist and homemaker: a mixed-methods exploration of the workload of community health workers (Accredited Social Health Activists) in India Kawade A, Gore M, Lele P, Chavan U, Pinnock H, Smith P, Juvekar S, RESPIRE collaboration Human Resources for Health. (2021) 19:7 Project data Download the project Data Management Plan View the project metadata on the Health Data Research Innovation Gateway This article was published on 2024-09-24
