Introduction
Community health workers (CHWs) play an integral role in strengthening primary healthcare systems by linking communities to healthcare services.1 They are directly connected to the communities they serve—they live in them and are accountable to them—and, in many cases, receive limited training to provide basic preventive healthcare services.2 Beyond these commonalities, CHW programmes vary widely in terms of training, scope of practice and remuneration.3 Staffing models for CHW programmes range from salaried and relatively well-trained workers to volunteers with minimal training.3 4
Since the 1978 Alma Ata Declaration, a substantial body of evidence has emerged demonstrating the contribution of CHWs to improved population health outcomes to reducing health disparities.5–7 Similarly, the factors that influence the performance and motivation of CHWs are also much better understood.8 9 Recent evidence reviews identify a combination of technical enablers such as training, supervision and remuneration, and contextual factors including sustained political support and funding, community embeddedness and integration with the health system.8–10 Yet despite these advances, CHW programmes continue to face the same challenges that have constrained them for decades: inadequate financing, lack of supplies and commodities, low compensation of CHWs and inadequate supervision.11 12 These factors serve to demotivate CHWs and detrimentally affect retention, thus threatening the sustainability of community-based health programmes.13
Indonesia is home to one of the largest and longest-standing CHW programmes globally yet has been subject to relatively limited research.3 The community health workforce, known as kaders, are village health volunteers whose primary task is to organise monthly village health posts, known as Posyandu, where they assist village midwives to provide activities including health and nutrition counselling, immunisation campaigns, monitoring and screening activities for diabetes and hypertension, and maternal and child healthcare.3
In addition to their usual duties, kaders in Malang district of East Java province play a crucial role in the SMARThealth programme—a mobile health-supported community-based intervention to optimise preventative care and treatment for cardiovascular diseases. Kaders screen community members for cardiovascular risk using a tablet-based application, which provides individual risk information, management plans and decision aids to assist nurses and doctors decide on the appropriate treatment for high-risk patients. Over a 2-year trial period in eight villages of Malang district the SMARThealth programme reduced the number of people at high risk of cardiovascular disease by 14.5% and was found to be cost-effective.14 15 In 2020, the programme was adopted by the Malang District Health Authority to be scaled up to all 390 villages in the district, a targeted population (those aged 40 years and older) of one million residents. Ensuring that kaders are well-supported and motivated to perform at a high level will be critical to the continued impact of the SMARThealth programme at scale.
The development of appropriate strategies to support kaders requires an understanding of their preferences for their working conditions. A discrete choice experiment (DCE) is a quantitative survey-based approach to eliciting individual preferences. Respondents are presented with a series of hypothetical choices between two or more alternatives, each of which is described by a set of attributes of varying levels.16 For instance, for patient preferences, respondents may be asked to choose between treatment options that vary in terms of efficacy, cost and side effects. This method allows the analyst to assess the value placed by patients on each attribute and the trade-offs they are prepared to make between them (eg, how much additional cost would they be willing to bear for more efficacious treatments?) and determine overall treatment configurations that optimise overall patient preferences. Furthermore, heterogeneity in preferences between different types of respondents can be assessed.
DCEs have been widely used in health economics research and, more recently, to inform health workforce policies in low-and-middle-income countries.17 The use of DCEs to assess the preferences of CHWs, particularly volunteer CHWs, has steadily grown since 2014.17–23 Findings often highlight that a mix of financial and non-financial incentives are critical to support the motivation, performance and retention of CHWs. For instance, in Kenya, Abuya and colleagues found that transport was considered the most important incentive attribute for volunteer CHWs, followed by tools of trade and job incentives that offered higher monthly stipends.24 Most of these studies have been conducted in African countries, with relatively few in Asia and none were identified carried out in Indonesia.
In this study we conducted a DCE with kaders in Malang district, Indonesia, to assess their preferences for their employment conditions. Results of the DCE will provide health system planners important information on the working conditions that best promote the motivation, performance and retention of kaders and support the scale up of the SMARThealth programme.