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“We are desperately short of health workers and many have not had training in newborn care. Your videos are an amazing resource to help us train these workers.”
We commonly get feedback like the above from the field – all over the developing world — from remote areas in Africa to island nations in the Pacific. We founded Global Health Media Project to design and produce videos that provide frontline health workers and populations with the basic health care information they need to improve care and save lives.
Dr. Priscilla Wobil—a pediatrician at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in southern Ghana—provides a good example of the teaching power of video. During her newborn care classes for midwives and doctors, she shows the videos as part of her teaching. According to Dr. Wobil, the videos stimulate discussion and help speed up learning. She states, “The videos are excellent teaching tools. Nearly everyone in my classes takes copies back to their home districts to have them as reference materials.”
Understanding the need for better and more accessible health care information, GHMP started producing videos in 2011. Our first series is on newborn care: 35 brief vignettes that bring alive newborn care guidelines. We began a childbirth series of 15 videos in 2013. Our videos go to the heart of topics in a simple and concise way with “need-to-know” information. All videos feature high-quality footage filmed in developing countries, voiced over to enable narration in many languages, and animated where needed to bring out key teaching points. The videos can be used as complementary teaching tools in pre-service and in-service training sessions, and as job aids for health workers. Some of our videos will be also adapted for mothers and caregivers such as “Warning Signs in Newborns” now out for field-testing.
We now have 20 videos on newborn care that focus on skill building, recognizing and managing newborn illnesses, and other key topics such as newborn physical exam, the home visit, and how to refer a sick baby. Users state, ‘the videos are very effective teaching tools’ and are grateful for the ‘clarity and easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions’.
Narrated in English, Spanish, and Swahili, with French and Nepali coming soon, the videos have been viewed in 200 countries and downloaded 7,000 times by staff from UNICEF, WHO, teaching institutions, Ministries of Health, and large and small NGO’s. We are currently field-testing five more videos on newborn care and six in our new series on childbirth.
Global Health Media Project is filling a critical niche with clear practical instructional videos that support training in resource-limited settings worldwide. Conveniently designed for mobile devices and freely available under our Creative Commons license, the videos provide opportunities to leverage the Internet to provide information that is so desperately needed to improve health care around the world.
Global Health Media Project produces videos that “bring to life” critical health care information for providers and populations in low-resource settings. They achieve worldwide distribution at low cost via the Internet and mobile devices.
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Deborah Van Dyke |
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Very excited topic, feeling so much courage and very interesting as community health volunteer