COMMUNITY CASE STUDY article
Front. Health Serv.
Sec. Health Workforce
Volume 5 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frhs.2025.1535804
The Community Health Worker Academy: A Novel Healthcare and Public Health Workforce Development Model
Provisionally accepted
Nathan McCaughtry
Cheryl L Somers*- Wayne State University, Detroit, United States
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As the demand for an expanded Community Health Worker (CHW) workforce accelerates nationwide, the need for training, continuing education, professional development, and experiential field placements (internships and apprenticeships) with quality supervision has expanded dramatically. For example, the US state of Michigan recently received federal approval for the health education and social determinants of health services provided by CHWs to be eligible for Medicaid insurance reimbursement (governmental subsidized healthcare insurance), which has spurred tremendous demand for the CHW workforce by all types of employers. This paper describes a series of events and opportunities that led to the development of the Wayne State University Community Health Worker Academy (CHWA) in Detroit, Michigan, USA. Preliminary evidence suggests that the Academy's model and continuous process improvement strategies are successful. Implications of this model for other organizations involved in expanding and strengthening the CHW workforce development nationally and internationally are discussed, as are implications for career pathway opportunities for CHWs beyond their initial certification.
Keywords: community health worker, Workforce development and training, Public Health, Community Health, Social determinansts of health, Urban
Received: 12 Feb 2025; Accepted: 27 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 McCaughtry and Somers. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Cheryl L Somers, Wayne State University, Detroit, United States
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