
Noelle WigginsCHW Center for Research and Evaluation
Noelle Wiggins
EdD, MSPH
About
29
Publications
9,301
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Citations
Introduction
Noelle Wiggins, EdD, MSPH, has over 25 years' experience conducting community based participatory research and evaluation about Community Health Workers and popular education methodology. My primary areas of interest include: comparative effectiveness of popular and conventional education as strategies for increasing empowerment and building capacity; role of popular education in reducing health inequities; role of Community Health Workers as community organizers.
Additional affiliations
March 1998 - June 2017
Multnomah County Health Department
Position
- Principal Investigator
Education
September 2005 - March 2010
Portland State University
Field of study
- Curriculum and Instruction
September 1995 - June 1997
September 1979 - June 1983
Publications
Publications (29)
In multiple and related forms, violence is a serious public health issue with lasting impacts on health and wellness in the United States. Community health workers (CHWs) are frontline public health workers and trusted members of communities.
We aimed to analyze recent examples of CHW activities in violence prevention public health programs with a...
Background
Low birthweight (LBW) and preterm birth (PTB) are more common among Black infants than white infants in the United States. Although multiple hypotheses have been proposed to explain elevated rates of PTB and LBW, the perspectives of Black midwives who serve Black communities are largely missing from the literature.
Methods
Using semi‐st...
Background:
Substantial evidence supports community health workers' (CHWs) contributions to improving health and reducing inequities. Common evaluation indicators can strengthen the evidence base and support the profession.
Objectives:
We describe the development of a 6-year community-academic partnership to identify common CHW process and outco...
Despite progress in documenting the outcomes of Community Health Worker interventions, the lack of standardized measures to assess CHW practice has made it difficult for programs to conduct reliable evaluations, and impossible to aggregate data across programs and regions, impeding commitment to sustainable, long-term financing of CHW programs. In...
The ability of community health workers (CHWs) to provide culturally centered health education derives from their understanding of community norms, idioms, and worldviews, combined with their knowledge of health issues. CHWs provide culturally appropriate health education and information by conducting health promotion and disease prevention educati...
Community health workers (CHWs) possess a set of core roles and competencies that make them distinct from other health professionals. The way these roles and competencies are understood and practiced is different from that of other health professionals. Differences between the CHW profession and other professions are rooted in how the profession de...
The 2010 Affordable Care Act provided new impetus and funding opportunities for state Medicaid agencies to integrate community health workers (CHWs) into their health systems. Community health workers are trusted community members who participate in training so they can promote health in their own communities. This qualitative study shares lessons...
This technical report was compiled by the Hispanic Health Council in partnership with Southwestern AHEC and a panel of Community Health Worker Policy Research Experts which included our Katharine London from the Center for Health Law and Economics. The report offers a number of policy recommendations for community health workers for communities tha...
The roles of CHWs identified in this chapter of the 1998 Natl. Community Health Advisor Study (Rosenthal, Wiggins, Brownstein, & Johnson, et al.) have served as the basis for policy making in at least 7 states.
Recent publications have called for new approaches to training the next generation of health promotion professionals, for
whom effective practice depends on understanding how systemic inequities are created and function and how they can be dismantled.
These approaches gain particular urgency in the context of recent trends toward commodification of...
The role racism and other social determinants of health play in the creation of health inequities in African American communities in the United States is increasingly understood. In this article, we explore the effectiveness of an Afrocentric, popular education-based community health worker (CHW) training program in creating positive change among C...
Increasing recognition of the role of social conditions in health has led to calls for methods that can be used to change social conditions. Popular education has demonstrated great promise as a methodology that can be used to address the underlying social and structural determinants of health. To date, most studies of popular education have used q...
Oregon has long been a leader in health care reform and the CHW field. Currently, Oregon is leading another phase of health care innovation; Senate Bill 3650, passed in 2011, laid the groundwork for the establishment of Coordinated Care Organizations (CCOs) throughout the state, and highlighted the role of CHWs within these CCOs. These CCOs bring t...
Community Health Workers (CHWs) are carefully chosen community members who participate in training so that they can promote health in their own communities. While CHWs in the US today play multiple roles, a variety of studies have suggested that CHWs' role as agents of social change is their most important role. Current efforts to recognize CHW con...
Current efforts to better integrate Community Health Workers (CHWs) into the health and social service systems are promising, but may be less effective if they fail to support the role of CHWs as social change agents. The way CHWs are trained influences the roles they play. In this article, we review the literature on CHW training and summarize les...
This article presents information on a community retreat developed to seek input from community health workers (CHWs) to increase the relevance of our research to underserved communities in Oregon. Retreats facilitating dialogue between researchers and CHWs could yield important insight to enhance the significance of research for communities.
Beginning in 1999, a series of employee groups began to shift public health practice at the Multnomah County Health Department (MCHD) in Portland, Oregon, towards the vision of health promotion articulated in the World Health Organization's Ottawa Charter. In 2007, a cross-departmental team created a conceptual framework grounded in the principle t...
While there is now general agreement that the most effective way to promote health and decrease health inequities is by creating more just economic, social and political conditions, there is much less agreement about concrete ways in which public health practitioners can work with communities to address inequities such as poverty, racism and powerl...
This article compares and contrasts 3 national studies of the US Community Health Worker (CHW) field spanning 15 years. Findings cover 4 areas of overlap among the 3 studies: CHW Demographics, Core Roles and Competencies, Training and Credentialing, and Career Advancement and Workforce Issues. Implications for the future development of research, pr...
In critical and feminist educational circles there has been a lively debate between those who call for more emphasis on contextualisation and concrete practices and those who defend a more generalised view of critical pedagogy. The unceasing march of corporate globalisation and neoliberalism make it absolutely urgent that educators and organisers d...
Popular education is a philosophy and methodology for education and organizing that seeks to create settings in which people can discover and expand their knowledge and use it to create a more just society. It is gaining prominence as a strategy for building capacity in communities to advance health equity. La Palabra es Salud (The Word is Health)...
Empowerment has been advanced as a strategy for eliminating remaining health disparities. Popular education promotes community empowerment by increasing individuals' and communities' awareness of their capacity and providing a framework and strategies through which participants can identify and resolve problems. Poder es Salud/Power for Health, a c...
Evaluations of Community Health Worker programs consistently document improvements in health, yet few articles clearly describe the roles of Community Health Workers (CHWs) from the CHWs' perspective. This article presents the CHWs' points of view regarding the various roles they played in a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project, Po...
A community-based participatory research intervention, Poder es Salud/Power for Health, employed Community Health Workers who used popular education to identify and address health disparities in Latino and African American communities in a metropolitan area in the United States. We assessed participants' social capital, self-rated health, and depre...
There has been an appeal to reduce health inequities by increasing community involvement and social capital. Poder es Salud/Power for Health is a community-based participatory prevention research project that seeks to address health disparities in the African American and Latino communities by enhancing community-level social capital.
We provide sp...