Community Health Systems for achieving universal health coverage: panacea or poison?

Dr Taegtmeyer is a Reader and clinical academic at LSTM where she heads the community health systems research group.

In this seminar she introduces the group and summarises its research contributions to the global debate on achieving universal health coverage through expanding community health approaches. She defines what a community health system is and discusses how community health workers juggle multiple tasks and expectations at the interface of communities and health systems. Instead of asking ‘what can they do for us as the final common pathway of every vertical programme in the world?’ We ask ‘What are they telling us about their work at the interface and how can we support them to optimise the quality of their work?’