Developing a WHO African Region mOral Health Curriculum for Community Health Workers

Background: Training allied health professionals in oral health promotion and disease prevention, and integrated into noncommunicable disease (NCD) management, has been shown to improve access to essential oral health services. Oral diseases in the WHO African region are a significant public health problem, and trained dental professionals are scarce. Objectives: The WHO African Regional Office (WHO AFRO) aims to create a novel tiered oral health workforce, beginning with community health worker (CHW) training on oral health, and utilizing combined in-person and virtual/digital learning through mobile technologies (mOral Health). Successful scale of the program will assist in improving the oral health knowledge, skills, and behaviors of CHWs in Africa, as part of their essential packages of basic services. Approach: Guided by a logic model framework, our approach for developing the mOral Health curriculum was based on a proven six-step model for curriculum development in health professions education. Steps 1-3 describe our approach for developing the training program: Step 1: Problem Identification and General Needs Assessment; Step 2: Targeted Needs Assessment; and Step 3: Goals and Objectives. Results: Step 4 describes the resulting curriculum and educational strategies. This is the WHO African region's first competency-based CHW training program universally accessible to all member states. Step 5 (Implementation) and Step 6 (Evaluation and Revision) are planned for subsequent work at a future stage of this project. Conclusion: The mOral Health curriculum for CHWs in the WHO African region leverages digital technologies as part of the WHO mHealth initiative and aligns with the WHO Global Strategy on Oral Health. This mOral Health curriculum can lay the groundwork for further development of an evidence-based, tiered oral health workforce in Africa and will integrate oral health services into the WHO AFRO agenda for the prevention, control, and management of NCDs across the region.