For those living in ward 11, one of the poorer areas of Soweto, waiting in long queues for medical treatment had become increasingly problematic.

One of the first in Africa

For the inhabitants of this area, though, things have changed for the better. Nowadays, community-based health workers, trained and equipped with basic health education, go from door-to-door to do household assessments, gathering information about the family’s medical history.

Chiawelo Community Practice (CCP) is an experiment in developing community-based care in South Africa, a model that involves General Practitioner (GP) teams contracted to the National Health Insurance. It is one of the first of these projects on the African continent….more