Effectiveness of health communicators program in promoting of community knowledge, attitude and practice in Iran through educational interventions: A systematic review

Community participation in health programs is essential for their success, and community health volunteers (CHVs) program is a favored form of participation. Given that three decades have passed since the launch of the Health Communicator Program (as a form of health volunteers) in Iran and the importance of evaluating its achievements, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of health communicators program in promoting knowledge, attitude and practice of community health thorough educational interventions.

This is a systematic review and its literature review was conducted in February of 2020.  The search of resources was conducted using ‘community health communicator’, ‘community health volunteer’, and ‘Iran’ in PubMed, Scopus, Web of Sciences and their Persian equivalent in SID, Magiran and Elmnet database/ search engine. The number of 13558 was obtained from this search, which finally the number of 15 articles was included in study and their quality were appraised. In continue, the related contents of included articles were reported as extraction and comparative tables, and final conclusion was done based on them.

The health communicators program in Iran had good positive effect health knowledge and attitude of community in different health areas but this program has not been successful in improving community health performance/behavior. Assessing the targeted areas to improve in community health performance through provided educational interventions by CHVs in the final included articles showed that from 34 targeted health areas, CHVs have succeeded in promoting six areas, only.

The health communicatorschr('39') program needs to be promoted or replaced with a more effective one in community participation due to its low impact on community health behavior