Leverage the power of ritual to improve community health worker efficacy and public health outcomes: Lessons from Bihar, India

Abstract

Biomedical health interventions now have global reach and interact in complex and often poorly understood ways with traditional medical rituals that precede biomedicine. People often experience biomedical practices and treatments as rituals because they are very similar from an experiential perspective. 1 Yet the global public health community often views ritual practices of communities as obstacles to adopting new health-promoting behaviors. The lack of engagement with the biomedical and traditional medical rituals of local populations has obscured understanding the critical functions of these behaviors, limited the potential to leverage ritualization to increase behavioral uptake, and stymied social and behavioral change efforts. Our large-scale, mixed methods research with Community Health Workers (CHW) in Bihar, India, has shown that understanding the rituals of a community provides critical insight into their identities, norms, values, and goals. We propose that health interventions should be informed by, and build upon, knowledge of health rituals. A deep understanding of existing beliefs and behaviors will allow local health "influencers" such as CHW to encourage new and modified rituals that integrate the best of biomedical and traditional health practices in ways that preserve their meaning and shared purpose. Grants INV-008582 and INV-016014 to C.L. from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded this manuscript.