Asia Pacific Community Health Workshop | 1-5 June 2015 | Bangkok

Community-Based Health and First Aid (CBHFA) is an approach of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) aimed at supporting communities so that individuals, households and the community in general are empowered to take charge of their own health, including reducing risks and strengthening resilience to health threats.

New modules and guidelines have been developed to reinforce the CBHFA toolkit and to further support NS in expanding the range of health issues that their community health programmes and initiatives can address and respond to. These include the Healthy Lifestyle (HL) Module as IFRC contribution to the prevention of non-communicable diseases (NCD) and the Violence Prevention (VP) Module. An Epidemic Control for Volunteers’ (ECV) toolkit was also produced to complement an existing CBHFA module. In addition, a planning, monitoring, evaluation and reporting (PMER) toolkit was also developed to also support NS in strengthening the programming quality of its community health initiatives, ensuring that these are evidence-based.

The IFRC has also committed to scaling up its contribution to community resilience strengthening, which requires an all-inclusive and multi-sectoral approach, and possibly change in mindsets. Many NS have already ventured into integrating CBHFA with other community-based programmes such as disaster risk reduction (DRR), water and sanitation, shelter, to name a few. These efforts include looking for ways of harmonising their tools, currently focusing on community-based participatory assessment.

Asia Pacific Community Health Workshop was conducted on 1-5 June 2015 in Bangkok, Thailand, as part of the knowledge sharing and capacity strengthening efforts of the IFRC Asia Pacific Health Team in community health. This workshop is supported by the Finnish Red Cross.

The workshop was organised to facilitate knowledge sharing of good practices and lessons learned on evidence-based community health programming – which will ultimately contribute to the enhancement of capacity of NS health managers and coordinators to design, implement and manage these programmes.

The specific objectives of the workshop are to:

• Learn and discuss recent developments and future directions in CBHFA across the world, and how these relate to recently-adopted IFRC framework for community resilience and related declarations, as well as the post-2015 global development goals, agenda and priorities.
• Share recent experiences, lessons learnt, local tools and materials produced through the implementation of programmes using CBHFA approach, including efforts related to integrated programmes and harmonization of tools.
• Revise on the CBHFA PMER toolkit, with focus on M&E using experiences of National Societies
• Agree on the way forward and next steps for 2015-2016

Click for the brief agenda, detailed agenda, concept note and report.

To view the materials click below:

• Pre-workshop reading materials: Epidemic Control for Volunteers | Non Communicable Disease | Reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health today | Violence Prevention | Framework for Community Resilience
• Presentations and resource materials: click here
• Posters and materials: click here