Glossary
Community Health Worker Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential community health worker terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key community health worker vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in community health worker training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Care coordination
- Organizing care across providers.
- Chronic disease
- A long-term illness like diabetes.
- CHW
- Community health worker.
- Cultural humility
- Ongoing respect for others’ cultures.
- Health equity
- Fair opportunity to be healthy.
- Health literacy
- Ability to understand health information.
- Medicaid
- Public health insurance.
- No-show
- A missed appointment.
- Outreach
- Reaching people where they are.
- Helping patients move through care.
- Promotora
- A Spanish-speaking community health worker.
- Referral
- Connecting to services.
- Screening
- Checking for needs or conditions.
- Conditions like housing and food that affect health.
- Teach-back
- Asking patients to explain information.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Community Health Worker practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Community Health Worker training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.