"One of the highlights of this past quarter was our opportunity to connect in person with many of our collaborators in Africa. Our US-based team traveled to South Africa and, along with our Cape Town team, hosted a partnership roundtable discussion. We discussed the challenges in the creation and delivery of education and training, potential opportunities for improvement, and how we can best work together to attain our shared goals. 

Some clear and recurrent themes emerged. It was meaningful to hear how our partners valued our contributions and how our work is being implemented in many local communities. While we work towards a future where digital literacy is more common, there is a clear need to support organizations implementing hybrid learning experiences. We must ensure that we do not exacerbate the digital divide.

We are committed to supporting community needs, and hope you will join us and register for our Digital Health Week event where we will further discuss how digital learning can complement in-person learning.

We are thrilled to have launched our Caring for Sick Children in the Community CHW training this quarter. It has been wonderful to work alongside Lwala Community Alliance, Philani Maternal, Child Health and Nutrition Trust, and One to One Africa to create training resources that resonate across groups, adding capacity to their existing in-person trainings. We endeavor to continue to build CHW training resources, and are excited to learn from the implementations of these course materials as we continue working towards a future where CHW training resources are available, high quality and accessible to all."

With best wishes,

Charles and Aarti

In line with Integrated Community Case Management (iCCM) guidelines, we created a digital refresher training to build community health workers’ (CHWs) skills in caring for sick children with Lwala Community Alliance, One to One Africa, Philani Maternal, Child Health and Nutrition Trust, and an advisory group of CHWs.

We are excited to share that our Advocacy Training for CHWs course has been officially recognized as a Digital Public Good (DPG).

We received an award from the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health to investigate how to better develop and distribute online training for managing health emergencies in order to help low-resource settings prepare for Disease X, the next as-yet unknown pathogen to cause a pandemic.
 
Our team is working together with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Health Emergencies Program, which manages OpenWHO, a web-based platform that offers courses to people working in pandemics and other health emergencies. The WHO team visited Stanford in September to kick off the project. We are eager to continue working together on this pandemic preparedness project over the next year.
 
“Open online courses are an incredible platform through which health professionals can quickly reach a broad range of learners with critical health information. When disease outbreaks occur, such a platform is invaluable. We are thrilled to work with the WHO Health Emergencies Program to understand how to make open online courses more accessible, equitable, and impactful.” - Dr. Victoria Ward, medical director at Digital Medic and principal investigator for this project

Photo credit: Nama Wellness and Ministry of Health Uganda

Nama Wellness Community Centre and the Ministry of Health Uganda officially launched the Advocacy Training for Community Health Workers course in September to welcome the course into Uganda’s national training curriculum.

We are thrilled that more CHWs will learn the advocacy, storytelling, and technology skills to promote positive change in their work and communities.

• What We’re Reading: “Only God Can Thank You’: Female Health Workers Fight to Be Paid”: This recent piece in The New York Times highlights the incredible impact of community health workers and their ongoing efforts to advocate for improved pay and working conditions. The article includes insights from Dr. Madeleine Ballard of the Community Health Impact Coalition and references our Advocacy Training for Community Health Workers.

• CORE Group webinar: In July, we presented our approach to digital training and health education alongside Hesperian Health Guides and ThinkMD: “The Evolution of Health Education and Healthcare”. Thanks to CORE Group for facilitating the discussion, you can watch the recording here.
  

• How to access Digital Medic content: We strive for all of our resources to be accessible across platforms, devices, and languages, with or without internet connectivity. Take a look at our new webpage which outlines the different ways to view and download our open-access content.
  

• 100+ health condition videos in English and Spanish: Explore our series on common health conditions with need-to-know health information on some of the most searched-for health topics in the world.
  

You have received this email because you subscribed to the Digital Medic mailing list. Digital Medic, operated by the Stanford Center for Health Education, collaborates with Stanford Online to send out its newsletter.