COVID-19: How Can Doulas Support Pandemic Control?

COVID-19 represents a great threat to public health in the 21st century so far, with the maternal and child (MCH) population being particularly vulnerable. With the healthcare workforce getting overwhelmed by a resurgence of cases, task-shifting approaches are a viable option to address the acute shortage of personnel for epidemic intelligence assignments related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose an intensive and short-duration curriculum to train Doulas versed in MCH epidemic intelligence and capable of reducing the burden of COVID-19 and its consequences on the MCH population. The effectiveness of the proposed curriculum will be monitored using a rapid-cycle evaluative approach to ascertain progressive enhancement over time. Copyright © 2021 Maiyegun, et al. Published by Global Health and Education Projects, Inc. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in this journal, is properly cited.