iheed and animated health worker training content
Stephen Macdonald
Dear ict4chw colleagues,
It’s great to have this opportunity to chat with you about what we’re currently doing with iheed, as well as pose a couple of questions to the hive-mind.
As you probably already know, we gained a great deal of momentum within the health worker training space with our previous international meetings, mHealthEd 2011 and 2012 (http://mhealthed.org). The next mHealthEd meeting will be held in Dublin, Ireland, in September this year, and will take the form of a two-day workshop focused on health worker training content creation- the official announcement will take place soon, so please watch this space!
Our interest in implementation of ICT for health worker training leverages the explosive growth of networks, mobiles, and even smartphones throughout the developing world. This enables the rollout of medically-led, standardised training using animations, which can be rapidly localised and delivered to anywhere on the globe via network or mobile phone connection (or easily distributed via CD or flash drive in cases where organisations inevitably operate with limited web access). The animations are short (1-3 minutes each) but focused, simple to understand, overcome literacy barriers, and are designed to impart specific knowledge that can be rapidly absorbed and reviewed at any time. Use of this type of content delivery within blended learning programs helps reduce the time that workers spend away from their communities whilst training, yet can still impart knowledge just as effectively as printed materials, and at a reduced cost.
Our online crowdsourcing platform (http://www.iheedcrowd.org) has been a great success, attracting interest from the Global Health community, as well as designers who can take part in our crowd-sourcing competitions to produce the next generation of digital animated training content. Here, briefs from our in-house medical and Global Health team are downloaded by animators, who then competitively submit storyboards showing their vision of how the animated module will look. The best three entries go through to the next round where animators work back and forth with the iheed team to produce the full animations. Finally, our independent judging panel assesses these entries, ranking first, second and third places. The animators win cash prizes, and receive publicity via our website and social media channels. We’ve had entries from all over the globe, and it’s been inspiring to see world’s design community tackling fundamental Global Health issues, and helping make a difference in changing people’s lives for the better.
We have been working to build more modules geared towards teaching health workers about a range of public health issues, including water sanitation, how to assess malnutrition, the dangers of smoking, family planning using Depo-Provera, and others. Our most recent animation is in the final stages of production, and will teach viewers to spot the warning signs of meningitis- this will be released in the coming weeks.
There has been great enthusiasm from the Global Health community for the animated modules, and they are now seeing use around the world by various organisations. We’re on the verge of scaling-up our activities, and are contracting with animators to produce specific pieces of content for a number of organisations in the Global Health field, so we have been very busy on that side. However, we’re also about to announce our next round of crowdsourcing competitions - hopefully one every month over the next year!
In addition, we’re always looking for advice from front line personnel and program managers to give us better understanding of the needs on-the-ground. Therefore, to round-off this post, we’d like to ask all our fellow ict4chw group members: what topics of animated training content would be on your wishlist? Do you have any thoughts on styles, or if you’ve implemented animated or video training in your organisation, what did you find works, or doesn’t work?
Wishing you all the best in Global Health, and looking forward to hearing your opinions!
Steve Macdonald PhD. (Global Health Intern, iheed) and Dr. Tom O’Callaghan (Founder & CEO, iheed)
neal lesh
Dear Steve, Tom, and the rest of the iheed team.
Thanks for this terrific post. It’s clear this work can complement a lot of the other efforts described on this mailing list. It’s also interesting how rare it see a focus on supporting training. I have a few questions but no need to answer them all...
Is your focus exclusively on health worker training? Do you expect your animations to also be useful for showing directly to patients or CHW clients? If the focus was on training, was there a particular motivation for that?
How hard it is to make videos that are globally applicable? Do they need to be adapted country by country? Or even between health organizations which might emphasize different aspects of a given health topic.
Are you much involved in the distribution of these videos or have thoughts about how health workers will or should get access to them? Or perhaps are you expecting that once the animations are available, many uses will be found for them.
Can you tell us a bit more about the judging panel or the criteria they use? Have you had a chance to test whether the animations are effective with health workers?
thanks again!
neal
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Girdhari Bora
- The animations can be modelled for training, self-learning, beneficiary-counseling, while the learning ones can be more detailed with lots of WHY's and HOWs answered the later ones will have to be simple and impactfull to focus on WHAT (key message) + IMPORTANCE (what if) + RISKS (What if not).
- The beneficiary messages/animations may work best if they are modelled to address local MYTHS (and that will be a challenge on localization of animated content, in future).
- Most of the CHW trainings are below par and thus animations , especially simulations in local settings can be an enormous help in improving the training quality. For e.g. a skilled birth attendant can be given to solve a simulated scenario of a delivery complication and the simulator behaves as per her responses.
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