WHO Guidelines for Training Traditional Health Practitioners in Primary Health Care

WHO Guidelines

Traditional health practitioners are a valuable and sustainable resource that already exists in most communities. The training and utilization of these practitioners in primary health care, working in close collaboration with conventional health staff, can be expected to contribute, in many countries substantially, to obtaining more practical, effective, and culturally acceptable health systems for communities.

The aim of these guidelines is to help individuals and organizations develop training programmes that will enable THPs to play a more significant role in primary health care programmes and thus to improve health conditions in their own localities.

Expanding the knowledge and skills of traditional health practitioners so they can assume more responsible roles in primary health care programmes can be a productive and rewarding experience: for the trainers; for the health practitioners; for other health professionals; and for community members.

Evaluation studies of projects that have trained traditional health practitioners have found that when these practitioners complete a training, they return to their communities and continue to disseminate the information they have learned to other healers and healer associations and groups within their communities. Thus, training efforts have a domino effect and are multiplied manyfold.

Projects which have begun to train traditional health practitioners in a variety of primary health care functions have found that communities benefit in assurable ways from the new knowledge and skills of these practitioners. Enhancing the role of these practitioners and promoting closer collaboration between them and the medical community offers new hope for improving the health of individuals and families through sustainable primary health care programmes.

http://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/pdf/h2940e/h2940e.pdf