Health Groups

Before setting up your community, consider your purpose - is it to coordinate and supervise community health programs, provide training and mentoring to community health workers, raise awareness of a health issue, or something else? Your purpose will help you to decide which members to include in the community and what groups they will be in. You might create or add groups for:

• community health workers by geographical area;
• community health workers by skill set;
• community health workers by health conditions or programs;
• new community health workers on basic training;
• ongoing training for community health workers;
• managers or program coordinators;
• hospital management team;
• healthcare teams – physicians, consulting nurses, medical social workers;
• medical supplies and pharmaceutical team;
• community leaders.

A clear community purpose will help your admin team and members to understand why some groups are added while others are not. For example, if the community’s purpose is to provide health education and primary care services for families, you might decide to create or add groups of community health workers who specialize in maternal and newborn health, or mental health counselling. You may even include a group to share success stories or discuss solutions to challenges encountered in the communities. However, in this case, it might not be appropriate to link social groups to your community.

Community admins play a crucial role in creating a safe and welcoming space where members want to interact, share their challenges, and celebrate their achievements. By developing and enforcing a good Code of Conduct for your Community on WhatsApp, you can nurture an empowering and respectful culture. A Code of Conduct is a collection of the rules, principles, and values that guide your community in understanding the behaviors and content that are encouraged or disallowed in the community.

There are a number of risks to be aware of when managing large groups online. Keep your community safe by providing clear guidance for your group and community admin team regarding:

• Group Invite Links and New Members - Invite links can be extremely useful in a context where program groups are constantly changing. However, links should only be sent directly to intended group members by private message, along with a warning that the link should not be forwarded to unrelated contacts. Work with your community and group admins to monitor and quickly remove any contact you do not recognise.
• Sharing private and sensitive information. Ideally your Code of Conduct or community rules discourage members from sharing their own or anyone’s personal information, such as physical address or email, and case-related information. In the code of conduct you may want to remind group members that some information is not appropriate to share with the larger group. If sensitive personal information or experience is being shared as part of a support group, advise members to use disappearing messages.
• Misinformation. As frontliners, community health workers often encounter misformation among their communities and beneficiaries. Ensure that your community and group admins are trained to help their members understand how to check facts, and act quickly to shut down misinformation and hoaxes by deleting the messages. Group admins might consider temporarily changing the “Send Messages” group setting to “Only Admins” to disable members from sending messages.
• Conflict management. Differences in personalities, beliefs, opinions, and expectations may lead to conflicts, especially when the community health workers, healthcare team, and hospital administrators may come from different communities with different cultures. It is important to promote diversity in your community rules and practices, and to support group admins with guidance and training on conflict management.

In community health-based communities, there should be a clear framework for appointing community and group admins, communicating and coordinating across the admin team, and holding group admins accountable for managing their groups.

It is best to select your community admins from among the leaders, managers, or individuals holding specific roles, within your various member segments – for example, community health managers with different skill sets, hospital administration executives, or nursing staff supervisors. At the same time, consider the skills and access to information that an admin will need to ensure that communication across the community is efficient and valuable to members. As each admin team member will have varying workload and capacity, it is good practice to recruit enough group admins to share the workload, avoid burnout, and ensure your community is sustainable. Consider appointing at least two community admins and two group admins for every group, and set up an Admin Only group for communicating, coordinating and supporting your admin team in fulfilling their roles.

When recruiting community and group admins, look for individuals who are:

• committed to the community’s mission and Code of Conduct;
• friendly, sociable, and resilient;
• have the time and capacity to coordinate and manage groups;
• have the right experience and skills to support the members in their groups;
• have the time to regularly communicate and meet with you and other admins to share learnings, best practices, photos, stories or data points.

To keep your community engaged, it is important to ensure that information provided in the Announcement group is valuable and relevant to everybody. This could include announcements about:

• recent or upcoming community health education, screening, and vaccine events;
• community health information and alerts from local health agencies;
• requirements and training for new community health programs;
• community health workers wellbeing and support resources;
• recognition and appreciation of individual community health workers.

It is good practice to consider the purpose of various groups within the community. Depending on their objectives, you can work with group admins to guide the format, frequency, and content of their communications. It may be useful to:

• send out schedules for community health workers group meet-ups or mentoring sessions;
• send out forms and reminders for record keeping and report submission;
• share best practices or experiences that will help community health workers, beneficiaries and patients;
• message community health worker groups to ask for feedback or respond to their frequently asked questions;
• share success stories or urgent requests with the hospital management team;
• send reports, questions and requests concerning community health conditions and patient treatment to health care teams.

Personal connection and recognition are key to ensuring that community health workers feel supported and remain motivated. Appreciate your members by @mentioning individuals for their contribution, and celebrating achievements and highlights by sharing stories and photos. Ask members for feedback about the information they find valuable and what they would like to see more of. Community and group admins can also connect in the Admin Only group to share what they think is working well and what isn’t, what groups could be added or removed to keep conversations more relevant, and whether certain announcements are better handled at a group or community level.