community healthcare workers

Background and Pre-Trip Prep

Posted on by ha9

We’re less than a week from being at St. Gabriel’s! The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of preparation, but luckily we’re almost ready to go. For the few people in my life who haven’t heard me talk about this recently, here’s some background:

From stgabrielshospital.org

The closest thing on Google Maps to St. Gabriel’s Hospital is the trading center of Namitete, Malawi, 60km from the capital city of Lilongwe. St. Gabriel’s is a privately owned 250-bed hospital that is responsible for the medical care of approximately 250,000 people in the mostly-rural surrounding areas. Among BTB internship sites, the hospital is distinctive for two reasons:

  1. St. Gabriel’s has an extensive community health outreach program.
  2. St. Gabriel’s has worked with BTB interns since 2009.

Liz, Daniel, and I will be a part of a long BTB legacy in Namitete, and a large part of our work this summer will be following up on previous BTB site projects and getting feedback and ideas for future BTB projects there. My part of the pre-trip preparations have focused largely on two of previous site projects, DataPall and the Community Health Worker (CHW) Backpacks, though we’re also readying the materials to get feedback from the healthcare providers there on IV Drip, Sphygmo, the Solar Autoclave, and Babymetrix. Some background on the first two:

DataPall: DataPall is a database for palliative care data that last year’s BTB team built on Microsoft Access specifically for the desktop computer in St. Gabriel’s palliative care unit. Palliative care is healthcare specifically aimed at relieving pain; as such, it’s one of the programs that is very active in the community and has a unique set of needs and data types.

Setting up DataPall was really a yeoman’s work by Kamal, Teresa, and Tara, and this year we’re bringing a router in hopes of  expanding the system to two laptops in the clinic. Learning Microsoft Access has been a fun little adventure!

CHW Backpacks: It’s easy to talk about the gee-whiz technologies — I spent two summers working with mass spectrometers, and people tend to be pretty amazed at the power of analytical chemistry to peer at the world on a molecular scale. This summer, though, I get to work with a slightly simpler, but no less empowering, technology: the backpack. Elizabeth Nesbit Spiegel, who was part of the 2011 team, put together a great video of community health workers talking about the backpacks:

The CHW Backpacks were designed by Rice undergraduate students and first deployed at St. Gabriel’s in Summer 2011. The backpacks create an identity for the volunteer community health workers in the hospital’s outreach program and allow them to bring more supplies with them and reach a wider range of patients. It’s a seemingly obvious idea that took a lot of optimization to get right, and I’m looking forward to bringing the 10 more backpacks that we put together so that more of the health workers can use them and they can go out in smaller teams.

As the nerves and excitement ramp up and I start picking out reading material for the many flights, I’m feeling incredibly grateful for the work the 2011 team did with the CSA backpacks and the 2012 team did with DataPall. I can’t wait to get to St. Gabriel’s, improve on the previous technologies and see how we can make ourselves useful to the St. Gabe’s community!

Imagine trying to teach business skills to 3rd graders…Sound tough?

Posted on by Jasper Yan

144 students
2 trainings
4 sessions for each training
36 students for each session
3 hrs for each session
6 hours total instruction time per student
48 hours of total instruction time for teachers

Our microenterprise training program to teach necessary business skills as a means of tackling poverty is starting to materialize. We’ve already hashed out the overall logistics for our program that will train 144 people who are leaders of their HIV support groups and Village Aids Committee (VAC). In order to spread out our material, we will be requiring them to come here to St Gabriel’s Hospital twice. They will come once next week (the week of July 12th), and once more the week after next (the week of July 26th) for 3-hr training sessions each time. Since they will be doing a considerable amount of traveling to get to the hospital, we will be providing them with soda and biscuits, and we are strategically avoiding having to feeding them lunch (considerably more expensive) by positioning the sessions right before and after lunch.

Since we have limited amount of time, and 6 hours of total instruction time, we are going to have to select the most crucial content that we developed last semester. Because almost all of our students have only primary school education, we will have to make things simple, REAL simple. We will have to take out extraneous concepts that are too abstract, and make sure to provide lots and LOTS of real-life examples to back up every concept that we do decide to teach. We will have to provide simple definitions that are easy to remember, as well. These are all things that Casey Nesbit emphasized from her experience in teaching during her 5 years here in Malawi. (Casey is the mom of Elizabeth Nesbit, who is a current Global Health Senior at Rice, and we are SO glad to have her experience and feedback)

We will present our revamped lesson plans tomorrow to Alexander (community healthcare worker liaison and palliative care nurse) and Angela (HIV support group liaison), and they will provide feedback. They will then translate the lessons into the local language (Chichewa), and we will update the lessons plans with the translations and make PowerPoint slides in Chichewa.

I never knew teaching could be this challenging. It seems like I’m constantly trying to stretch my brains out in different ways to try to understand how our students (with primary school education) will be thinking, and to determine the best way to get a point across. I guess nothing really could have truly prepared me for this challenge besides being in the environment itself. Imagine trying to teach business skills to a 3rd grader. How hard could it be! (sarcasm)

Okay, back to lesson planning!