Global Health Media Project produces and distributes teaching videos for frontline healthcare workers in low-resource settings. Based on international standards of care, the videos provide high-quality, step-by-step visual instructions that are easy to understand and put into action.
The videos are professionally filmed on-location in developing world health clinics and voiced over to enable narration in local languages. The videos are distributed free-of-charge via the internet, where they can be watched online or downloaded to mobile devices for offline use.
Mission
Their mission is to improve health care and health outcomes in resource-poor areas by developing videos that “bring to life” basic health care information known to save lives.
The Challenge
Frontline health workers provide the first and often the only care for millions of people in poor countries. But too often they lack access to essential information and training.
As a result, many of their patients die every year from medical conditions that could be readily prevented or treated. The lack of basic knowledge among the general population compounds the problem as people may not realize the need for treatment and/or delay seeking care.
When training is available, it is costly, requiring travel to major cities while health workers leave their home clinics unattended. Worse, the training is often ineffective. The passive, didactic lectures that are the mainstay of traditional training fail to illustrate hands-on experiences so critical to learning. And written materials can be ineffective due to language and literacy barriers, complexity of the content, and failure to acknowledge the challenges of delivering care in low-resource settings.
In a field where identifying clinical symptoms and developing practical skills are paramount, new approaches are desperately needed.
A Solution
Their short engaging videos provide a simple and effective solution to help health workers and communities gain the knowledge and basic skills that can save people’s lives.
In low-resource settings where literacy and language are obstacles to learning, step-by-step visual instruction has enormous advantages, especially when voiced-over in the local language. Video draws the eyes and ears to all the subtleties that make for good skill acquisition, and helps make learning “stick.”
The value of video as a tool to teach medical practices is already well established in the developed world. Yet even though worldwide access to digital video is growing, such videos remain vastly underutilized and largely unavailable in developing countries.
