WHERE WE WORK
ETHIOPIA
Mobile Learning for Primary Health Workers
This project, funded by UKaid (DFID), was aimed to increase the on-going, practical application of primary care skills of Health Extension Workers (HEWs) gained during and following training programmes. During 2 years we worked with HEWs who ewre taking part in their Level 4 upgrade training programme, using the Health Education and Training (HEAT) course content. The HEAT manual was the official upgrade training programme of the Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health.
As part of this project, we developed and released the updated mobile-ready versions of all the HEAT modules for our OppiaMobile application.
The main focus is on maternal and child care, but all of the primary health care topics were covered in the HEAT content. This gave us an excellent opportunity to develop and extend the OppiaMobile application as well as provide us with some valuable information as to how the HEWs use mobile learning and how it may help to improve the services they provide to their communities.
The mobile-ready content included quiz questions, and featured great video content from Medical Aid Films and Global Health Media Project and others. It provides a source of information that can be used for both pre-service and in-service training and to reinforce critical health messages, so that health workers feel confident and empowered to deliver effective services in their communities.
Data Collection and Maternal Care with Commuity Health Workers
A feasibility study in using smartphones with rural health workers in northern Ethiopia. We have trained community health workers to use maternal care protocols running on smartphones to assist their patient management and to provide clinical decision support systems. A localised version of Open Data Kit (ODK) has been used to collect patient encounter data for maternal care visits, along with an analytics dashboard and a mobile enabled scorecard for health workers to track their patients progress, appointments and risk factors.
We have had several papers published on this work, see our publications page for more information.
Our colleague, Araya Abrha has also made available the summary of his doctoral thesis “The use of mHealth for Maternal Health Care in Ethiopia” based on this work.
E-learning Training with University lecturers
We have trained lecturers from Universities in Ethiopia in how to use elearning and blended learning approaches in their teaching. Using our Certificate in Online Education course, lecturers developed new skills and tools to embed appropriate aspects of technology into their teaching practices.