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What the NHS is learning from Brazil


Knocking on doors to check on people's health and catch problems before they escalate is common practice across Brazil. But could that approach work in the UK?

Comfort and Nahima are two out of four door-knockers on round Churchill Gardens, a council estate in the Pimlico neighbourhood of London, visiting residents as part of a proactive community healthcare pilot.

They can help with anything from housing issues which impact health, such as overcrowding, or pick up the early signs of diabetes by chatting informally to residents about their lifestyle.

These community health workers are partly funded by the local authority and partly by the NHS so they can co-ordinate between the local GP surgery and other social services.

Local GP Dr Connie Junghans-Minton says the proactive approach had led to fewer requests for appointments

The National Institute for Health Research helped crunch the data from the pilot. Households which had been visited regularly were 47% more likely to have received immunisations and 82% more likely to have taken up cancer screening, compared to other areas.

The idea to import this model to the UK came from Dr Matthew Harris, a public health expert at Imperial College London who worked as a GP in Brazil for four years. There, community health workers have been credited with achieving a drop of 34% in cardiovascular deaths.

"In Brazil they have scaled this role to such degree that they have 270,000 community health workers across the whole country, each of which looks after 150 households, visiting them at least once a month," Dr Harris said.

"They've seen extraordinary outcomes in terms of population health in the last two or three decades. We think we've got a lot to learn from that."

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Source: BBC News, 9 May 2023

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