Community health workers as partners in the management of non-communicable diseases

Community health workers are a vibrant and unique workforce ideally positioned to function as members of interdisciplinary teams needed to address the global burden of non-communicable diseases. The article by Thomas Gaziano and colleagues in The Lancet Global Health1 provides a compelling scientific argument for incorporating community health workers into the systems of community-based screening and referral to predict cardiovascular disease risk as efficiently and accurately as physicians and nurses do.