Project Type(s):
Population Health/Implementation

Older adults are less likely to receive the recommended standard of care for preventative services, chronic diseases and geriatric concerns such as complex care navigation. Late-life depression is a common chronic disease, and older adults face multiple barriers obtaining depression care from healthcare settings, especially if things like fragility, social needs, and transportation limit access to primary care. Offering depression care in non-traditional healthcare settings is one way to increase access. Community health workers (CHWs) are trusted community members who increase the health of communities through care coordination, health education and outreach. One approach is to task-shift the Care Manager (CM) role of a Collaborative Care framework to CHWs in the community. Global health work has demonstrated that non-clinicians can conduct low-intensity psychosocial interventions for depression. However, task-shifting the Care Manager role in a non-clinical setting requires additional skills and poses added challenges. We have gathered prior formative work among CHWs on what they think about being trained and supported in the skills of CM. We now seek to understand Collaborative Care stakeholders’ perspectives on this proposed role expansion of CHWs to CHW Care Managers (CHW-CMs) to understand how to design this role.

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