CI-NEWS

Community workers armed for contact tracing

2020-10-06

No: 537

Community workers armed for contact tracing

Community health workers in Douala have been called upon to intensify contact tracing of COVID-19 patients as Cameroon intensifies its strategy to flatten the curve of the pandemic. The call was made by experts from the World Health Organisation and the Ministry of Public Health during a training workshop last week in Douala.

The workshop that held at the Laquintinie Hospital brought together over 80 community health workers specialized in contact tracing, to acquire better techniques for field work.

This workshop was part of the implementation of the activities of the project to support the decentralization of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic in Cameroon in the nine most affected districts of the Littoral region, namely; the health districts of Deido, Mbangue, Cité des Palmiers, New-bell, Japoma, Logbaba, Bonassama, Boko and Nylon.

The project is implemented by the Regional Delegation for Public Health of the Littoral with the support of WHO under funding from the French Agency for Development (AFD) and is expected to last for three months.

The workshop, held in the Nephrology room of Laquintinie hospital in Douala, not only aimed to strengthen the capacities of community health workers for monitoring contacts of Covid-19 cases in their various health districts, but also to equip them to carry out their activities.

According to Soterine Tsanga, one of the trainers from the WHO, contact tracing is very important in stopping the spread of the virus, reason why they needed to re-arm the health workers so as to improve on their work on the field.

“These are actors who had previously started working, but we have a number of things to review to improve the follow-up of contacts of confirmed cases of Covid-19. At the end of these three months, we want to have better performance in the nine health districts of Douala and when we talk about better performance, we are talking about having for example a reduced number of Covid-19 deaths, a reduced number of Covid-19 positive cases, a large number of voluntary screening in the screening centers of the nine health districts,” she said.

She added that with the new response strategy (track down, test, treat) they want to get to a level where practically everyone knows their status for rapid treatment in the event of illness.

For his part, Dr Mossi Hans, the assistant incident manager of the COVID-19 in the Littoral Region, said with shared strategies, the community health workers will be able to trace and reach all contacts within the three months which the project is supposed to last. According to the Covid-19 (SITREP) situation report N° 48 published on September 18, 2020, Cameroon has registered 20,371 confirmed, 416 deaths and 19,124 recoveries. The Littoral region is the second most affected region after Centre Region with 4,626 confirmed cases and 101 deaths.

Culled from Cameroon Insider

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Community workers armed for contact tracing