Some pictures from the SMPC reproductive health training:

http://dsh.cs.washington.edu:8000/distance/snaps/A3_DPC

Some more pictures from the BETI school in Mauthri:

http://dsh.cs.washington.edu:8000/distance/snaps/A5_Mauthri

And some old pictures of the various spoke and hub workshops:

http://dsh.cs.washington.edu:8000/distance/snaps/A6_workshops


On Nov 17, 2007 2:57 PM, Randolph Wang <rywang@cs.princeton.edu> wrote:
>  
>  Things are going well at SMPC.  Plans are getting more fleshed out by 
>  the day.  No doubt, SMPC will become a very strong hub.  It's much 
>  more than a hospital.  It runs nurse and other professional staff 
>  training, targeting students from poor backgrounds; it runs health 
>  awareness and front-line health care worker training for selected 
>  villages; it routinely sends its own staff and trainees to villages to 
>  run "camps" and "surveys," dispensing medicine on the spot, providing 
>  counseling, and making referrals; it works with other NGOs and 
>  government entities.  A big part of our job is to understand these 
>  pieces and see how we can help these wonderful activities scale beyond 
>  its current vicinities.  Right now, there're three main lines of work 
>  for us---no doubt, over time, our thoughts will change, but this is 
>  what we have in mind at this point. 
>  
>  
>  (1) Nurse training. 
>  
>  We've been filming for several weeks now.  We will start pilot remote 
>  learners (spokes) around late December or Jan.  The graduates will 
>  take the standard government exam for nurses at the end of the 2-year 
>  program, and will have a high chance of getting good employment, in 
>  hospitals, or working with NGOs.  This not only provides valuable 
>  vocational training for the poor students, but also strengthens the 
>  health care system by funneling well-trained people into the system 
>  and spread the "SMPC way."  Some of the remote students will come from 
>  the various DSH schools so this provides an ongoing advancement path 
>  for "our students." 
>  
>  An aspect that's not satisfactory at the moment is that the doctors 
>  who are providing the training, for the most part, are not schooled in 
>  teaching.  The classes are often dry talking heads with lots of 
>  dictating and note-copying, apparently a very standard practice in 
>  this country.  We have had discussions with Dr. Brigeeta and we'll 
>  start to try to make some drastic improvements.  In particular, we 
>  will add more visual aids, add more practical hands-on components, be 
>  more interactive, and have some of the doctors put through some 
>  "teacher training."  So we hope that in addition to achieving the 
>  Digital Polyclinic (DPC) goals of producing superior content, we also 
>  improve the quality of the vanilla local training itself as well.  At 
>  the end of the process, we're likely to produce a digital corpus that 
>  will get adopted by components of the state government and distributed 
>  and replicated widely. 
>  
>  (2) Village health care awareness and frontline worker training. 
>  
>  We've started filming a sequence of workshops on reproductive health. 
>  While the nurse training mentioned above is for young students seeking 
>  a profession in health care, the trainees in this case are ordinary 
>  villagers who will keep their "day jobs."  One trainee is selected 
>  from each of the participating villages.  The goal is to teach them 
>  enough about the rudimentary so they can provide advice and help for 
>  the fellow villagers.  The topics include stuff like: at what age is 
>  it healthy to give birth (girls get married off at very young ages 
>  here), how do you know you're pregnant, who're the high-risk cases, 
>  do's and dont's during pregnancy, giving birth, child-rearing, 
>  nutrition, family planning, etc, etc.  (like rubbing cow dun on a 
>  freshly cut umbilical cord, an apparently common practice here, is not 
>  a very good idea.) 
>  
>  Unlike the nurse training program, which is currently staffed by 
>  doctors who don't always know how to teach, the villager training is 
>  run by top-rate trainers who know what they are doing.  We're struck 
>  by the amazing level of quality and sophistication.  The trainers 
>  probably have never been filmed before, but wielding a microphone, 
>  walking amongst the villagers, mingling with them, enacting role 
>  plays, constantly smiling and chatting, they remind me the most 
>  accomplished talk show hosts or tele-evangelical preachers---no doubt 
>  this is a terrible analogy---I'm just pointing out how good their 
>  people skills are and you can tell that from the villager responses. 
>  But unlike the talk show hosts, the substance ratio is extremely high. 
>   I was impressed by the fact, for example, in today's session, they 
>  brought a very pregnant woman to the training and demonstrated how to 
>  do simple examinations and got each of the trainees to demonstrate 
>  what they have learned. 
>  
>  What we will do in DPC is almost obvious.  When these women go back, 
>  they will become the mediators (or "animators" in Rikin's jargon), and 
>  mediate the digital versions of the shows for their fellow villagers. 
>  The fact that the fellow villagers will see their neighbors on TV is 
>  very much in sync with what Rikin has been doing in Digital Green. 
>  The duration of the training can be in the space of a couple weeks to 
>  a month, with perhaps several hours a day.  So what it means is that 
>  we don't have to give away a TV and DVD player to each village 
>  permanently---the equipment can be rotated and shared and on the go 
>  from village to village.  This is not far-fetched for SMPC 
>  either---SMPC has mobile libraries and we're just a digital form of a 
>  mobile library. 
>  
>  (3) A global distributed patient record database. 
>  
>  SMPC staff run "camps" in villages where they give out medicine and 
>  make referrals.  Trainees are also required to run "surveys" in 
>  villages which do some of the same things as "camps," except camps are 
>  stationary while "surveys" are door-to-door.  What we're seeing is a 
>  potentially powerful way of providing care to villages: relatively 
>  less experienced staff dispatch the simplest cases on the spot and 
>  collect data for the more complicated cases and make referrals for 
>  experienced doctors to look at later.  We can systematize this process 
>  electronically so more people can benefit from this approach.  In 
>  addition to the more conventional demographic and text data, we could 
>  collect richer multimedia data, documenting symptoms and complaints. 
>  These could all be funneled into a giant global "health vault" where 
>  experienced doctors at the mothership examine the data and make 
>  judgment on how to proceed later.  On a scheduled later return trip to 
>  the previously visited village, the staff will dispense more 
>  medicines, and pick up certain patients and ferry them back to the 
>  mothership for further examination.  These case histories will also be 
>  used for ongoing training for the less experienced staff so they can 
>  learn to filter out more and more simple cases---this is the 
>  scalability angle.  We will rent (initially) or buy (later) vans for 
>  these mobile digital "camps." 
>  
>  SMPC has also been asked to work with and improve run-down gov 
>  hospitals and other NGOs.  Over time, the vault will develop into a 
>  global "health vault."  So one can imagine that this is a single vault 
>  where people from multiple places are making referrals, where the 
>  skills of the experienced can be applied on referrals submitted from 
>  anywhere, where the less skilled can learn to become increasingly more 
>  skilled over time. 
>  
>  
>  Think of this also as a hub-and-spoke model.  SMPC today is the hub. 
>  And we're radiating its "power" to its vicinity in the form of, for 
>  example, remote nursing schools, village women health training 
>  sessions, mobile "camps," gov-run hospitals, and NGOs.  In the longer 
>  run, we want the "SMPC way" replicated elsewhere so we end up with 
>  more hubs like it, and one way of learning and replicating the "SMPC 
>  way" is, again, through a future massive digital corpus, in the form 
>  of the various training materials and a giant patient history 
>  database, to which the other sites may also contribute to and learn 
>  from.  And that, for now, is the "Digital Polyclinic vision." 
>  
>  > 
>  _______________________________________________ 
>  http://dsh.cs.washington.edu 
>  
>  Studyhall-discuss mailing list 
>  Studyhall-discuss@lists.cs.princeton.edu 
>  https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/studyhall-discuss 
>  
>  

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