Processes and Capacity-Building Benefits of Lay Health Worker Outreach Focused on Preventing Cervical Cancer Among Vietnamese

The authors organized a lay health worker (LHW) outreach program with Vietnamese women that produced significant increases in Pap testing. The program was conducted by five partner agencies and 50 LHWs and involved 1,005 women. This article reports on the roles of the agencies and coordinators, the selection of LHWs, the processes LHWs used in identifying and recruiting participants, the ways they conducted their outreach work, and their strategies for maintaining participation. The article also reports on the LHWs’ perspectives about how they benefited and what they found to be most rewarding and challenging about being a LHW. Based on the analysis of this information, the authors present a conceptual framework for understanding how different contextual factors shape the processes and capacity-building benefits of LHW outreach, describing four contextual domains that shape LHW outreach: the sociocultural domain and organizational domain, which overlap in the programmatic domain, all of which are framed by the structural domain. This analysis provides an approach for understanding how lay health work is shaped by a broader context.