Institutionalising community engagement for quality of care: moving beyond the rhetoric

Key messagesComprehensive and appropriate community engagement is critical for quality improvement initiatives and improving health outcomes for communitiesToo frequently community engagement is poorly defined and inadequately documented, and efforts to engage communities are not integrated into existing health systemsExperience from Ghana and Nepal shows the importance of generating and documenting evidence of impact as well as cost effectiveness to support institutionalisation of community engagement to improve health qualityCommunity engagement is widely recognised as a cornerstone of public health programming to achieve universal health coverage,12 but what community engagement entails and whether it’s robustly implemented are not always clear. Here, community engagement refers to groups of people in communities collaborating with other stakeholders in the identification, planning, design, governance, and delivery of health services to tackle health related matters and promote wellbeing (box 1).56Box 1Relevant definitions for understanding the complexity of community engagementCommunity engagement terminology is used inconsistently. Similar terms are…
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