South Africa, like most African countries, has years of experience in deploying health guides or community health workers to provide healthcare to vulnerable groups. They are pioneers in this field, and our healthcare system can learn from their experience. This is a form of reverse innovation or trickle-up innovation, where the experience and knowledge from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are shared with high-income countries.
This is the objective of this project: First-Line Zone Gent and researchers from Ghent University will learn from the experiences in South Africa to integrate health guides into primary care. We intend to do this through a study visit by three key figures from the healthcare project in Gent to our partner at the School of Public Health at the Western Cape University. The Gent team will consist of two health guides, a coordinator from the Gent project, and a researcher from the department.