Chiricahua Community Health Centers & CHW Voluntary Certification

June 13, 2023

Since 1996, Chiricahua Community Health Centers, Inc. (CCHCI) has served the diverse communities of Cochise County as the region’s only federally funded primary care, public housing and migrant/seasonal farm worker health center.  Our service area is designated as a Health Professional Shortage Area and a Medically Underserved Area. Cochise County is an area the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined (including one hundred miles of the U.S./Mexico border), and both geographic isolation and prevalence of poverty makes preventive and primary health care inherently complex and challenging.  CCHCI is uniquely positioned to respond to these challenges via a team of over three hundred and seventy highly trained employees and an extensive network of both fixed and mobile clinics.  In 2019, CCHCI attended to over 30,000 unique patients, many of whom had complex health needs; over 5,000 of those patients had no form of health insurance.

 

CCHCI has had a Community Health Worker (CHW) program almost from our inception (1996).  Historically, our CHWs have been employed to target our “special populations” including migrant and seasonal farm workers, residents of low-income housing, and our homeless population.  Approaches to working with these vulnerable populations via the community health worker model have included targeted efforts to address physiological, social, psychological and economic factors that influence resident’s health

 

We recently entered into a “second phase” of our program development by pursuing approval for our Community Health Worker Training Program through the AzCHOW and the Arizona CHW Workforce Coalition.  An approved program ensures that our CHW training program will be based in the ten core competencies which include:

•   Equipping CHWs with the skills and knowledge to work in a variety of areas

 •   Preparing CHWs to express their professional identity and unique competencies

 

The process for approval began in 2019 and was completed in 2020 when we were notified by the “training program review committee” that our program design addressed all 10 core competencies. Our newly developed CHW Training Program consists of three phases of training over a 32 week period.

 

CCHCI sees many benefits to completing the “Training Program Approval” process.   Of primary importance for CCHCI is that this process helps to ensure that our CHW workforce is competent, confident and knowledgeable about the skills unique to their profession.  We also believe that by standardizing our training, we are increasing our staffs’ employability and job performance and that we are contributing to developing future opportunities for workforce sustainability and for voluntary certification in the state of Arizona.  CCHCI is proud to be a part of both our local and our national efforts of using CHWs to address the health disparities that exist amongst some of our most vulnerable residents. 

Contacts
Ramses Sepulveda, MPA
520-626-5682