Opportunities and Challenges in Designing a Public Health Knowledge and Skills Curriculum for Refugee and Migrant Community Health Champions in the West Midlands, England (UK)

Abstract

There has been much discussion recently about the potential of Community Health Champions (CHCs) to promote universal health coverage in the United Kingdom. Among refugee and migrant groups, there is concern that untrained community workers miss out on understanding the major causes of poor health outcomes. This study aims to examine the challenges and opportunities that influence the designing of an effective curriculum to help CHCs develop the necessary knowledge and skills. A qualitative evaluation of a collaborative public health curriculum with this primary objective, focused on aspiring CHCs drawn from refugee and migrant populations, was conducted. The 5-week curriculum was delivered as a community partnership between a local university, three metropolises, and three refugee and migrant centers, all located in the West Midlands, United Kingdom. We found no evidence of existing curriculums that target refugees and migrants to develop knowledge and skills for influencing health services utilization by individuals within their own community. It is an opportune time to introduce such a curriculum because health providers occasionally use CHCs for some roles in their activities. Important challenges in this curriculum concerned generating consensus on content, dealing with power structures in negotiating the content, and agreeing on boundaries in curriculum activities. There is evidence of CHCs from refugee and migrant backgrounds having an interest in developing skills for helping reduce health inequalities in the United Kingdom. This study concludes that significant challenges exist in designing a CHC curriculum that all stakeholders can easily accept, but not having consensus on content may be detrimental to their learning.