“Our curriculum ourselves”: A participative approach to curriculum development on ethics and professionalism for community health workers

Abstract

Based on a felt need for training of community health workers on ethics and professionalism, we embarked on an attempt to develop a curriculum for the short course. We conducted interviews among community health workers and community members in Tamil Nadu and compiled a set of case vignettes to use in this course. Then we gathered an expert panel to come together for a two-day consultative workshop to develop and refine this curriculum. This expert panel had community health workers, civil society representatives, representatives from non-governmental organisations working in the health sector and academics and researchers from public health. We deliberated on various aspects of the course. In this report, we describe the participative process of curriculum development for training of community health workers on ethics and professionalism.