Nonprofit Volunteer Surge Launches Effort to Recruit, Train and Deploy 1,000,000 Volunteer Health Workers in Communities across the U.S.

Our entire healthcare system, especially in hard hit areas, is now under siege by COVID-19.  Doctors, nurses and hospitals, as well as state and city health authorities, are overwhelmed with the epidemic,” said Yale School of Public Health Dean, Sten Vermund, MD, PhD, an epidemiologist and pediatrician. “Task-shifting, which allows tasks to be delegated from doctors and nurses to trained health workers, can reduce the burden on our system and save lives by allowing scarce medical workers to focus on the more serious COVID 19 care operations while trained health care volunteers pick up other tasks.”

Beginning today, interested candidates can visit VolunteerSurge.org to join the effort. To become trained, volunteers will complete an approximately 30-hour, fully-online Community Health Worker Course developed by Cinematic Health Education in consultation with the Yale School of Public Health. Offered free of charge, this training was adapted from an existing commercially available training curriculum to focus on COVID 19. There is a GoFundMe Charity campaign that can provide volunteers who are experiencing financial hardship from COVID 19 with a small stipend as they do this necessary work for their communities.

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