El Manual Para el Pueblo (The Manual for the People): a pictorial aid for community health workers to identify surgical conditions

Abstract

Background Access to safe, effective, and affordable surgical care is a pressing contemporary public health issue. Deaths from surgically treated conditions exceed those from HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. Community outreach is a potential driver of access to surgical treatment, yet education among community health workers (CHWs) about such conditions is insufficient. Here, we describe the development and testing of a picture-based curriculum-El Manual Para el Pueblo (The Manual for the People)-to help CHWs to identify and refer surgical conditions in a largely illiterate population.