Personal Values of Being a Long-term Peer Health Educator Cadre for Elderly and Reproductive-age Women Communities: a Qualitative Study

Maintaining health cadres in a long term program is important as well as challenging. A collaboration ofuniversity, financial support institution (BTPN) and international NGO (Grand Aides) has developed five yearscommunity empowerment, named Daya Program to promote community health education. The program trainednew workforce of customer volunteers to perform peer health education for elderly and reproductive age womencommunities in nine cities across Indonesia in 2012-2017. This study aimed to evaluate personal value of layelderly and reproductive age women for being a long-term peer health educator cadre in Indonesiaand exploredhealth cadres’ perceived benefit, motivation and challenge. To this end, semi-structured focus group discussionwith twenty cadres and interview with nine area supervisors were conducted. Thematic analysis was employed toanalyse the data collected. Daya Program benefited not only to the community but also to cadres and their family.Beside promoting financial benefits, health cadres and their family perceived social incentives for their status of beingpeer health counsellor in the community such as pride and respects from their neighbourhood. Cadres’ skill inperforming some health screening like blood pressure check and self-breast examination were highly appreciatedby the communities. Cadres feel trusted and meaningful because client openly discuss sensitive health issues likebreast lump among them. Such incentives had been external drivers for the cadres to actively involve in the longtermprogram. Cadres emphasized perceived respect from the community as important reason, beside financialbenefit, that maintain their contribution in long-term. Therefore, these lessons might be important for communityhealth program drafter in designing long-term peer health development program.