Digital Medic Quarterly Update

January 2024

Happy New Year! As we kick off 2024, we are filled with hope and excitement as we continue to explore ways to improve global health by equipping community health workers (CHWs) and frontline providers with life-saving health information.


With the completion of our childhood illness course and our new TB and HIV content, the health workers we serve are better able to provide care every day to the global community. This course provides us with the opportunity to experiment with optimal implementation, adaptation, and continual learning — all of which will help set the roadmap to even more effectively deliver CHW curriculum and education.


Any new year would not be complete without a resolution so we wanted to share our hope for Digital Medic: We know we can only grow and have an impact working together with partners like you. Our strategic planning process has highlighted that what we all enjoy and are the best at is bringing together partners and working together. We want 2024 to be our year of expanded collaboration - we will spend our time and energy building new partnerships, strengthening our existing ones, and creatively thinking about other stakeholders we can engage to increase scale and impact together. 


With best wishes,

Charles and Aarti

 


Let’s Collaborate! We want to hear what health education and training needs your organization has. Please email us: [email protected].


 

Recent Updates

1
Train: New Videos and Job Aids on TB and HIV

Our Caring for Sick Children in the Community course is now complete, with six modules on cough, fever, diarrhea, malnutrition, Tuberculosis (TB), and HIV.

   

Worldwide, children between two months and five years of age die mainly from illnesses that can often be treated or prevented. Trained CHWs can save lives, and this on-demand refresher training equips health workers with essential knowledge wherever and whenever it’s needed.
 
We created this training for CHWs together with Lwala Community Alliance, One to One Africa, and the Philani Maternal, Child Health and Nutrition Trust. All videos, exercises, and patient teaching tools are free for anyone to access on any device, online and offline.

Explore the complete course

2
Learn: How Digital Learning Supports In-Person Training for CHWs

In-person training is invaluable for health workers — but how can we support CHWs in reviewing content and continuing their learning outside of existing training sessions? Digital learning can fill critical gaps in health worker training, enhance the capacity of our global health workforce, and save more lives.

 

Thank you to Victoria Ward and Monika Deschodt from Digital Medic, Emma Chademana from One to One Africa, and Hellen Gwaro from Lwala Community Alliance for hosting a webinar on this topic during Digital Health Week 2023. Watch the recording to learn why our organizations worked together to create a digital training course for CHWs, and how One to One and Lwala are implementing the course in South Africa and Kenya.
Revisit the discussion

3
Explore: Over 120 Videos on the Most-Searched Health Topics

For the past two years, our team has been creating short videos to spread evidence-based information about some of the most searched-for health conditions in the world. You’ll see the videos marked as being “from an authoritative health source” to help YouTube’s 2.1 billion monthly users easily identify credible content on the platform.

 

We are thrilled to have videos on mental health, cancer, infectious diseases, and more in both English and Spanish. This video collection is now complete, and we will continue to combat misinformation with evidence-based content as part of our organizational mission.
Browse videos on the most-searched-for health conditions
 

Research Spotlight

“Exploring the role of community health organizations in promoting public health during a health crisis: a qualitative study of COVID-19 responses in South Africa and Zambia”

 

Community-based education bridges the gap between institutional guidelines and local realities. It is an effective way to spread important health information as it directly engages with end learners.

  

Formally, governments play a leading role in spreading public health information. However, accessibility barriers and cultural mistrust in many marginalized communities often prevent important messages from being received. This communication gap is one factor that amplifies health inequities, especially during a health emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic.
  
When COVID-19 began spreading around the world, we heard from our NGO collaborators in sub-Saharan Africa about their successes and challenges in reaching communities with critical health information. We quickly responded with our adaptable COVID-19 toolkit, designed to share evidence-based information in customizable, visual formats.
 
Along the way, we discovered a lack of research on the role of local organizations in disseminating health information during a global public health crisis, and how organizations like Digital Medic can support them. Our evaluation team launched a qualitative study from May to June 2020, conducting semi-structured interviews with the leaders of 19 NGOs in Zambia and South Africa. Our goal was to better understand how these organizations were responding to the pandemic and to understand their needs in educating and supporting their communities during a crisis.
 
The study was recently published in Sage Journals. Take a look to see what we learned and how to prepare for future health crises.
 

Additional Highlights

  • Access all Digital Medic resources for free on any device through our website and mobile app for iOS and Android
 

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