Considerations for linking South Africa’s Youth-friendly Services to its community health worker programme

Abstract

In this article, we open the debate on whether or not South Africa’s Youth-friendly Services (YFS) programmes should be linked to community health worker (CHW) programmes. Both are important in South Africa’s efforts to re-engineer primary healthcare in the country. This article presents the pros and cons of linking the two programmes by incorporating YFS into the current list of CHW competencies. Also, we explore the alternative of training specialist CHWs to deliver YFS. We argue that regardless of which approach is adopted, research is required. Furthermore, efforts should be made for policy-makers, researchers and practitioners to join together and channel research findings into the design of people-centred health policies.