Volunteers Motives in Relation to their Task Preference in Health Service Delivery: A Case of West Kenya. Task shifting refers to the rational redistribution of tasks from health professionals to community health workers in order to improve access to care and optimize the use of limited human resources.
Since 2006, global attention has been drawn towards human resources for health
crisis, which is worse in lower income countries. This crisis has re-energized the focus on the
use of community health workers in service delivery, through task shifting. Task shifting has
gained in prominence and urgency to meet the demands concerning the health systems.
Existing studies demonstrate that CHVs play a critical role in providing household services, substituting for health professionals participating in a range of tasks, in the quest towards universal health coverage and sustainable development goals. CHVs help increase access to, and facilitate the use of healthcare services during medical cases as tuberculosis, immunization and family planning programs, particularly in populations with limited access to healthcare facilities.
In complying with the expectations and having received sufficient investment and support, community health workers show great potential towards strengthening the current situation of health systems. The tool developed by Ochieng and colleagues22 provides a method for describing the CHVs tasks and ranking them in the order of their preference.
The study concluded that the volunteer assessment framework developed by Ochieng and her colleagues is useful, not only in the identification of volunteers likely to volunteer long-term but
also in the assignment of tasks they are likely to prefer and that would satisfy their motives for volunteering. It is noteworthy that the two constructs, altruistic value and material gain are
adequate, both to identify long-term volunteers and to allocate them the most appropriate tasks. This would contribute to sustainability of volunteer initiatives.
