Focusing on the Role of Nontraditional Health Workers

When we think about the global health workforce, we usually picture nurses, doctors, and midwives first, perhaps followed by other cadres such as pharmacists. Nontraditional health workers can be overlooked, although they play an important role in health service delivery.

Taking the first step toward expanding CapacityPlus's HRH Global Resource Center (GRC) to focus on nontraditional health workers, the GRC produced an interview with Melissa Driver Beard. She is the executive director and CEO of Engineering World Health, a nonprofit based in Durham, North Carolina.

One of Beard’s roles is to oversee training programs for biomedical equipment technicians in Rwanda, Cambodia, Ghana, and Honduras. The program provides training on critical maintenance and repair skills. In the interview, she told the GRC’s Rebecca Rhodes about the role of this nontraditional cadre and gave examples of how this type of worker contributes to health service.

“In Rwanda, for example, we are training 16 Rwandans from hospitals all over the country,” Beard said. “Some of them have never had any formal training and don’t have the tools they need to do their jobs.” Following the training program, a biomedical equipment technician figured out how to fix a broken x-ray machine that was supposed to serve 25 patients a day. “The hospital was able to see the 25 patients per day rather than spending the money to transport them to another hospital,” she said. “Enabling techs to make quick and inexpensive repairs of this critical equipment has a huge impact on the availability and timeliness of patient care.”

The HRH Global Resource Center is CapacityPlus’s digital library of human resources for health information.

Photo: Courtesy of Melissa Driver Beard