Health Worker Training
ICHA operates under the principle that any health worker, if properly trained and educated, can effect change in his or her community. We have applied this strategy to design an innovative curriculum that provides community health workers with the knowledge and tools to identify and treat cardiovascular disease. ICHA's clinical volunteers provide detailed instruction to teach local community health workers how to modify cardiovascular disease risk in their communities. ICHA's specialized team of researchers, medical professionals, and educators have created a comprehensive teaching curriculum that provides local health workers in both classroom and clinical settings with the necessary tools to stratify risk and modify cardiovascular disease risk.
Through ICHA's training program, community health workers learn how to use Framingham risk scoring, a system of stratifying risk of cardiovascular events that is commonly utilized in developed nations for cardiovascular risk assessment. This risk scoring system takes into consideration genetic and lifestyle factors that contribute to cardiovascular risk to quantify the ten-year cardiovascular event risk for each individual. Risk factors that are commonly used in Framingham risk scoring include hypertension, age, gender, hyperlipidemia, tobacco use, obesity, and presence of diabetes. ICHA teaches community health workers to identify cardiovascular risk factors and assess overall risk, and then to modify risk by providing simple interventions clinically proven to reduce the likelihood of disease.
ICHA's team of experts has analyzed and compiled guidelines for cardiovascular risk assessment and modification based on guidelines from the American College of Cardiology, American Heart Association, and World Health Organization. These guidelines include recommendations for medication dispensing as well as simple techniques for nutritional counseling and lifestyle modification. Through didactic seminars, hands-on workshops, and on-site clinical teaching, teams of ICHA volunteer doctors and nurses train local health workers to identify and treat cardiovascular risk factors with lifestyle interventions and medications. By training health workers, ICHA provides communities with the ability to sustainably and significantly reduce the prevalence of heart disease and strokes.