Community health workers became essential during COVID-19 for contact tracing and healthcare delivery when vaccines and antivirals didn't exist. The speaker argues their role, proven internationally, should reshape how we deliver health care going forward.
The new norm can well be constructed of things that we learned during this pandemic. The fact that we have no medicine, acute Western type antiviral drug or a vaccine yet, nor will we have a vaccine that can really be distributed for a couple of years, that we are relying on individual people, the community health workers, the contact tracers, which literally are picking up the telephone and talking to people and walking them through this. They don't have to be doctors. They don't have to be scientists. They don't have to, they need training, but very specific training. They're of the community. They have the language. They have the cultural sort of understanding of their fellow person. They have the empathy. And that's the sort of thing that you and I were not really trained to do. We had our white coat on. We walked in the room. We had knowledge in our head. And in our policies, structured the system such with these almost most cast-like systems of doctor protection, you can't use telemedicine, you can't use telemetry, you can't practice outside of your state, you can't let nurses do things, you can't let community workers. I think this COVID thing is a great equalizer here, that the future of your safety and my safety, our family's safety is going to depend on people who can go out and do this contacts tracing. They're community health workers. And it's all over the world. And it's one of the things that all the countries that I've operated in and done surgery in, I have learned more overseas than here about the way healthcare should be practiced. They use community health workers as their primary care. And it can be done. It can be done successfully.
