Health extension officer
Open-knowledge reference entry
Health extension officers or health extension workers (HEWs), are a category of health care providers found in some countries including Papua New Guinea and Ethiopia. They usually work in health centres in rural and medically underserved areas, where they see and treat patients and provide a range of community health services.
Health Extension Officer (HEO): Papua New Guinea by Frank Yagahe
In 1967 the Health Extension (HEO) program was transferred from the Papuan Medical College in Port Moresby to the College of Allied Health Sciences in Madang, formally known as the Paramedical College. In February 2002, the College of Allied Health Sciences amalgamated with the Faculty of Health Sciences at Divine Word University (DWU). It offered a three-year Diploma in Health Sciences (Health Extension) program. The three-year program was extended to four years of study in 2008 for a Bachelor of Health Sciences (Rural Health) degree.
The Bachelor of Health Sciences (Rural Health) program is designed to equip students with the most current knowledge, skills, appropriate behaviours and attitudes to deliver an acceptable level of clinical healthcare, public health, administrative and management skills. The emphasis is on rural areas where more than 80% of the nation’s population lives. The medical program places a special emphasis on training healthcare givers who can work with limited resources and often in the most isolated areas.
The HEOs are trained to work in the Rural Health Center.
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This entry incorporates text from “Health extension officer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.