Amanda Puckett

mPossible! Health Workers Can Get Training Anytime, Anywhere with Interactive Voice Response

September 2014 by Amanda Puckett
TAGS: Amanda Puckett, Family Planning, Health Workers, Interactive Voice Response, IVR, mHealth, mLearning, Mobile Phones, Senegal

This post originally appeared on the K4Health blog.

Advances in mobile health—or mHealth—have expanded the realm of possibility for remote education, diagnostic and treatment support, communication and training, disease tracking, monitoring, and data collection. Every day, mHealth grows to include more sophisticated applications for high-tech smartphones and tablets. But what about health workers—specifically those in rural areas who don’t have access to the latest technology?

To learn more about mLearning (or mobile learning) for health workers, IntraHealth International, through the CapacityPlus project, piloted an innovative program to provide refresher training to family planning service providers in Senegal using interactive voice response (IVR) technologies on basic mobile phones. Read more »

The Winds of Change

March 2014 by Amanda Puckett
TAGS: Amanda Puckett, Community Health Workers, Health Workers, Midwives, Nigeria, Preservice Education

Amanda PuckettThe Harmattan is a dry and dusty wind that blows right over Nigeria from the Sahara Desert into the Gulf of Guinea. During my recent trip to Abuja, the Harmattan was nearly ending and the dust was beginning to lift its cloud over the city, making way for clear and sunny days. I thought this was a perfect analogy for CapacityPlus’s work supporting preservice education for midwifery and community health workers in the country.

Just outside of Abuja at the School of Midwifery FCT Gwagalada, I had the opportunity to meet with 19 midwifery students, each a beneficiary of a scholarship provided by CapacityPlus to assist with tuition fees for their third and final year of training. Read more »

New Software Application Tracks Health Workforce Training

January 2014 by Amanda Puckett
TAGS: Amanda Puckett, Health Workers, iHRIS, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda

This post was originally published on VITAL, the blog of IntraHealth International.

The globaAmanda Puckettl agenda is clear: universal health coverage. And as we heard at the Third Global Forum on Human Resources for Health, a strong, qualified health workforce is essential to achieving this goal.

But how do we create a strong global health workforce that can provide care to all seven billion of us? One of the keys is information—reliable, accurate information on health workers’ skills and qualifications.

Data on individual health workers’ training can be hard to come by. The information is often scattered in paper files, buried in obscure databases, or simply does not exist. To help address this challenge, IntraHealth’s iHRIS team in Uganda customized the open source iHRIS software to create iHRIS Train, a whole new application that captures and reports health worker training data. Read more »

Taking the E out of PEPFAR: Commemorating World AIDS Day 2013

November 2013 by Amanda Puckett
TAGS: Amanda Puckett, Health Workers, HIV/AIDS, World AIDS Day

Amanda PuckettPEPFAR. To me, these six letters symbolize one of the most significant global health commitments in history. The US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is the largest response by one country to a single health epidemic. Over the past eight years at IntraHealth International, I have supported a range of PEPFAR-funded country programs that have led to improving the lives of millions. And I have observed the United States’ cornerstone HIV/AIDS global development program transform from an emergency response to one that encompasses proven prevention and treatment programs, harnesses technology and innovation, and supports ownership at the country level. So as we commemorate World AIDS Day, I want to reflect on the progress we’ve made and contemplate that “E” in PEPFAR. Read more »

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