Reconfiguring the Community Health Workforce in a Super-Aged Context: An Empirical Study of Taiwan’s Community Health Manager Training Model

Abstract Book of the 19th International Conference on Humanities, Psychology and Social Sciences

Year: 2026

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Reconfiguring the Community Health Workforce in a Super-Aged Context: An Empirical Study of Taiwan’s Community Health Manager Training Model

Ju-Hui Wu

ABSTRACT:

This study investigates how a civil-society organization in Taiwan has reconfigured community health education capacity ahead of the country’s transition into a super-aged society. Using the Community Health Manager system developed by the ROC Technological and Vocational Education Exchange and Development Association (CITEA) as a case, we examine how an early, institutionalized training strategy built a sustainable and scalable pipeline of community health educators. Triggered by the founder’s recognition of Taiwan’s ageing trajectory in 2015, the program was designed to establish workforce infrastructure well before the demographic tipping point. We conducted qualitative interviews with instructors who have 3–6 years of frontline community teaching experience and who do not possess medical or allied-health backgrounds, focusing on the mechanisms through which lay trainees became paid community health teachers and on the system’s decade-long accumulated outcomes. Findings suggest that the program has developed a stable instructor supply and a diffusion network for health knowledge across community settings, addressing the structural gap created by overburdened clinical professionals who have limited capacity to deliver consistent community-level health education. Distinct from volunteer-dependent approaches, this model professionalizes lay health education as paid work. The high social acceptability and family-friendly nature of community venues enables educators to sustain teaching while managing caregiving responsibilities for parents or children, generating a reinforcing cycle of improved public health literacy, income support, positive emotional experience, and strengthened self-health practices. Taiwan’s 2025 super-aged milestone provides a critical context for observing scaling effects and highlights a transferable, prevention-oriented pathway for ageing societies worldwide.

Keywords: Caregiving ; Civil-Society Leadership; Health Literacy; Lay Educators; Prevention-Oriented Policy