The community component of the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) strategy addresses family and community child care practices. The family and the community where children live play a major role in child health and development. There is a longstanding need to involve the family and community actively and plan and implement child care interventions in both the health system and the community in parallel.
Initially, the main focus of the IMCI strategy was on improving clinical care provided at health facilities to outpatient sick children but increasingly attention has been given to fully integrated child care in the home.
In the Region the strategy broadened its scope to become known as the Integrated Management of Child Health, while still retaining its original acronym “IMCI”. Greater emphasis was placed on promoting good child care practices at home and in the community under the IMCI community component.
While many interventions and projects exist at community level which concern child health, there has been some delay in countries in integrating such interventions into a comprehensive primary child health care strategy that includes a well developed community approach effectively linked with the health system (i.e., the “IMCI community component”). Furthermore, interventions often fail to reach the most vulnerable.
WHO developed a training package on “Caring for sick children in the community” as part of a community health worker-based approach to child health care.
Framework for the community component of the integrated child care strategy [pdf 752kb] | Arabic [pdf 1.58 Mb] | French [pdf 955 Kb]
