Blog

“I’m a Health Worker”: Saving Lives in Rural Uganda

July 2012 by Sarah Dwyer with Wanda Jaskiewicz
TAGS: Health Workers, I'm a Health Worker, People That Deliver, Retention

Bernard Tayebwa and Dr. Solomon AsiimweBernard Tayebwa knows how important his job is to his community. His favorite part of being a senior clinical officer at Rugyeyo Health Center III in Kanungu District, Uganda, is nothing less than “saving the lives of patients.”

To the north in Kabarole District, Dr. Solomon Asiimwe articulates the flip side of the lifesaving nature of their work. The toughest part of his job as a medical officer at Kitojo Integrated Development Association, an NGO hospital, “is when I care for patients and sometimes they don’t improve, sometimes they are terminally ill and they pass away.” Read more »

Mobile Apps to Support Community Health Workers: Adapting Trusted Content to New Mediums

July 2012 by Lily Walkover and Robin Young, guest bloggers
TAGS: Community Health Workers, mHealth, Open Source

This post was originally published on the IntraHealth International blog. Lily Walkover and Robin Young describe how Hesperian Health Guides is adapting its trusted sources of health information into open source mobile applications for community health workers.

Lily WalkoverIn developing countries around the world, as many as 50% of people are now using cell phones. Access to cell phones is certainly greater than access to reliable health care and health information! Yet in the emerging field of mHealth—the use of mobile phones to support health—the focus has veered significantly toward data collection. At Hesperian Health Guides (publisher of Where There Is No Doctor), we’ve been part of a conversation to expand that focus and include using mobile phones to deliver health information to community health workers and the people they support.

Health educators all over the world have told us how they have adapted our print resources to their needs. At times this has meant literally cutting up images and text with scissors in order to prepare presentations, handouts, and other materials to provide accessible health information to their communities. This hunger for resources combined with enormous user creativity has motivated us to design mobile apps that not only make health information more accessible, but also facilitate adaptation, feedback, translation, and conversion into new formats for lower-end mobile technologies. Read more »

Expanding iHRIS to Support the Social Services Workforce

July 2012 by Dykki Settle
TAGS: Health Workers, iHRIS, OVC, Social Welfare Workforce

This post was originally published on the iHRIS blog.

Dykki SettleWhen we think of health care workers, we tend to think of doctors, nurses, midwives, and the like. We originally developed the iHRIS Suite to track and manage these traditional, well-defined cadres.

But many other professionals provide needed services in hospitals, clinics, and communities, and their roles may not be so well-defined. The social services workforce is a critical segment of these workers, bringing essential services to communities and their underserved populations, such as orphans and vulnerable children, the often unseen victims of the HIV epidemic. Because there are few standards for job roles and qualifications in this sector, it’s hard to identify and hire qualified social workers and deploy them to where they can be most effective. Read more »

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