San Antonio, Texas — A new training center at UT Health San Antonio will offer Texas Department of State Health Services continuing education units (CEUs) for community health workers or promotores/as and continuing health worker instructors.
The new community health worker training center — located at the Charles E. Cheever Jr. Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics — is focused on serving the existing community health worker (CHW) and community health worker instructor (CHWI) workforce at UT Health San Antonio and will also be open to the entire community.
The training center is led by Jason Rosenfeld, DrPH, associate professor of Medicine, director of Global Health at the Cheever Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics, director of the South Texas CHW Workforce Preparedness Collaborative and co-director of Health Confianza.
“We are here to provide a service for UT Health San Antonio’s CHW workforce,” Rosenfeld said. “We know it can be challenging to find continuing education particularly for instructors, so we are now here to fill that gap. We want to collaborate with faculty and staff across the university to help sustain and strengthen our community health workforce.”
For faculty, departments or entities interested in turning their own content into continuing education units, the training center can provide some technical assistance as well as submit the CEU to the state for approval. This gives faculty and staff at the university greater support in converting existing learning modules, conferences or other learning opportunities into continuing education units.
Community health workers and community health worker instructors in Texas need to obtain 20 CEUs every two years to maintain their CHW certification.
Locally, MetroHealth, YWCA and South Central Area Health Education Center (AHEC), which is housed at the university, provide CHW certification training and continuing education.
“There are other CEU providers in the city, but we have a public health focus, a health care focus on CHW continuing education and CHW Instructor CEUs,” Rosenfeld said.
This new training center will also provide a gap in CHWI training, as only a fraction of training centers in Texas are certified to provide continuing education for CHW Instructors.
Later this summer, the training center will begin providing CEUs. Initial offerings may include public health modules, Community Health Club facilitator training, as well as other curricula originally developed to serve Health Confianza’s Community Health Club facilitator model.
“We want to be able to provide engaging and innovative CEUs for our on-campus CHWs. There are a number of CHWs and CHWIs working for various parts of the university,” he said. “We want to help build a robust workforce on our campus.”
The training center is provided by Rosenfeld; Melanie Stone, DrPH, MEd,CHWI, assistant professor of Family and Community Medicine and director of Community Service Learning; Shayanne Martin, MPH, CHWI; Santos Barrientes, CHW/CHWI; Gracie De Leon, CHW/CHWI; and Cynthia De La Garza-Parker, CHW/CHWI. All are community health worker instructors and part of the Health Confianza team.
For the foreseeable future, there will be no charge for CEUs.
For more information, reach out to Confianza@uthscsa.edu or follow Health Confianza on Instagram and Facebook @HealthConfianza.