The Village Health Team Factor

They are instantly recognizable in their lime green and blue uniforms.

Garrett and I with one of the VHT teams

Garrett and I with one of the VHT teams

By Michael Hu, '16

Published June 30, 2014, last updated on April 7, 2020 under Voices of DGHI

They are instantly recognizable in their lime green and blue uniforms. They know every resident in their villages. They know the locations of every single church, school, borehole, well and spring, and the shortcuts and footpaths to get to all of these places. They act as liaisons between their communities and the outside world, providing much-needed medicines for residents and connecting people to medical services beyond.

They are the Village Health Team (VHT) volunteers.

Funded in part by USAID through the Strides for Family Health program, the VHT program assigns three to four local resident volunteers to each village. These volunteers receive training to do public health outreach, whether that is providing services or promoting health messages. The VHTs with their registers keep detailed records of every single household in their villages, including the names and ages of all family members and their health issues, and whether or not each household has access to protected water sources, improved latrines, and hand-washing facilities. Along with the hospital system and parish health centers, the VHTs are a third pillar of the Ugandan health system, the part closest to the community, the first line of contact for local residents throughout the country.

Simply put, our work would not be possible without the VHTs.

The Uganda SRT program is unique in that we work directly with the communities that we serve, rather than going through NGOs. Our projects are also completely student-created and student-driven, with input from our advisors, rather than master-planned by professors. We depend on VHTs to make this happen. Without their input, we would not know what the community’s needs are, or what areas we should focus our research on. Without them, we would not know who to select for surveying, or where participants live and work. And most importantly, our service projects would be untargeted and infinitely more ineffective without their advice and help.

We are here to perform targeted research that is driven specifically by the needs of the community; to establish a baseline understanding of the maternal and child health, sanitation, and infectious and non-communicable disease burdens facing the community so that appropriate interventions may follow suit; and to make things like our annual health fair sustainable. The VHTs volunteer entire days and walk upwards of five miles each day just to show us where residents access food and water. They mobilize people to gather in the early morning to be blood-drawn, pressure-checked, blood glucose-checked and height-weighted. They go door to door to get the word out about upcoming events, both service and research, that we want the community to be involved in. And they do all this with smiles, laughter and gratitude.

The VHTs remind us why we are here.