Community Health Units¶

This chapter assumes that the reader is familiar with the general principles explained in the Using the API - basic principles chapter.

Kenya’s community health strategy relies on community health workers for outreach at the lowest levels ( embedded into communities ). These workers are organized into community health units. The second edition of the Master Facilities List provides APIs for the management of community health units.

This chapter concerns itself with the resources that model community health units and link them to facilities.

Note

Community health units are an extension of the Master Facilities List. A community health unit is a health service delivery structure within a defined geographic area covering a population of approximately 5,000 people.

Each unit is assigned 2 Community Health Extension Workers ( CHEWs ) and community health volunteers who offer promotie, preventative and basic curative services.

Each unit is governed by a Community Health Committee ( CHC ) and is linked to a specific health facility.

The role of a community health unit is to bring services closer to the people that need them. Those services include:

Water and sanitation hygiene; e.g. Faecal management, Household water treatment and demonstrations on hand washing with soap, etc.

Advice on maternal and child health e.g. Immunization, Individual birth plan, etc.

Provision of Family planning commodities.

Growth monitoring for children under 5 years.

Deworming of children.

Provision of Long Lasting Insecticide Treated Nets (LLITNs).

Management of diarrhea, injuries, wounds, jiggers and other minor illnesses.

Provision of Information, Education & Communication (IEC) materials

Defaulter tracing (ART, TB and Immunization)

Referrals to health facilities

First Aid Services

The implementation of community health units in this API is semi-independent. The units connect to the rest of MFL at only one point - their linkage to facilities.

Community Health Unit Approvers¶

The community health approvers resource holds the details of entities that are involved in approval of community health units.

The known approvers can be listed by issuing a GET to /api/chul/approvers/. To register a new approving entity, you need to supply a name, description and abbreviation. The following example illustrates that:

{
    "name": "Division of Community Health Services",
    "description": "Division of Community Health Services, Ministry of Health",
    "abbreviation": "DCHS"
}

Community Health Unit Statuses¶

The community health unit statuses that are known / available can be listed at /api/chul/statuses/ via GET. These will be used to mark the current status of a community health unit, and when analysing the status of registered community health units.

To create a new status, you need to POST a name and a description. Here is an example payload:

{
    "name": "ACTIVE",
    "description": "Actively Deployed"
}

Note

This reflects the operational status of the Community Health Unit.

Community Health Units¶

Community health units can be listed via GET to /api/chul/units/.

To add a new community health unit, POST to /api/chul/units/, POST a payload that has a name, facility and status. For the facility and status, the id s are sent ( foreign keys ).

For example:

{
    "name": "Gachie Health Unit",
    "facility": "2927d31f-b1a0-4d17-93b0-ea648af7b9f0",
    "status": "0e2ba3fc-9c81-4c30-b52e-b62664462cb7"
}

Note

The community health unit code is auto-assigned. Immediately after creating the facility record, the code ( and other auto-assigned fields ) will be inserted in the response.

Community Health Unit Contacts¶

A community health unit may be linked to zero or more contacts. The contacts will have been created at /api/common/contacts/ using APIs that are discussed in the Metadata resources chapter.

Community health unit contacts can be listed and created at /api/common/contacts/. To list a community health unit to a contact, POST to that endpoint the id of the contact and the id of the community health unit. The example payload below illustrates that:

{
    "health_unit": "2d425ab7-0002-4b95-9cd1-638972efb75d",
    "contact": "7dd62ab9-94c2-48d6-a10f-d903bd57acd5"
}

Community Health Unit Approvals¶

The approval status of community health units is listed / maintained at /api/chul/unit_approvals/.

To record a new approval, you should supply a comment, approval_date, approver, approval_status and health_unit.

The approver is the id of an approver registered at /api/chul/approvers/. The approval_status is the id of an approval status registered at /api/chul/approval_statuses/. The health_unit is the id of a community health unit registered at /api/chul/units/. The comment is a free-text explanation, while the approval_date is an ISO 8601 date ( not datetime ) string that represents the date when the approval occured.

The following example is a valid POST payload:

{
    "comment": "For documentation / training purposes",
    "approval_date": "2015-05-09",
    "approver": "02b610c1-067f-4e0c-9bad-31cc029f6ee3",
    "approval_status": "44c2abfd-3944-484f-ae4c-b30778e25398",
    "health_unit": "96645d26-8e4e-4078-9e10-a5176f5432df"
}

Note

This reflects the approval status of the Community Health Unit.

Community Health Workers¶

Community health workers are attached to community health units. They are listed and maintained at /api/chul/workers/.

When registering a new community health worker, supply a first_name, last_name, surname, id_number and health_unit. The health_unit is the id of the community health unit that the worker is attached to, and can be retrieved from /api/chul/units/.

{
    "first_name": "Does",
    "last_name": "Not",
    "surname": "Exist",
    "id_number": 545432,
    "health_unit": "96645d26-8e4e-4078-9e10-a5176f5432df"
}

Community Health Workers Contacts¶

A community health worker can be linked to a contact that has already been registered at /api/common/contacts/ by POST ing to /api/chul/workers_contacts/ the id of the worker and the id of the contact.

For example:

{
    "health_worker": "db04b653-b0f7-434f-a224-3ea4d93b69c1",
    "contact": "2d04afdc-46a8-4b11-85b8-63f5c035366f"
}

Community Health Workers Approvals¶

The approval status of community health workers is maintained at /api/chul/worker_approvals/.

The key pieces of information to maintain about each approval are the approver ( an id of an approver registered at /api/chul/approvers/ ), approval_status ( id of an approval status registered at /api/chul/approval_statuses/ ) and health_worker ( id of a health worker registered at /api/chul/workers/ ) and a free-form comment.

The example below is a valid POST payload:

{
    "approver": "02b610c1-067f-4e0c-9bad-31cc029f6ee3",
    "approval_status": "44c2abfd-3944-484f-ae4c-b30778e25398",
    "health_worker": "db04b653-b0f7-434f-a224-3ea4d93b69c1",
    "comment": "Documentation example"
}