Telemedicine and village pay phones (5)
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Dear Dr. Swai,
Thank you for your note regarding your clinics telehealth project. As I
mentioned in my post to the list, the purpose of the CHANGE Project is
to provide a focused source of leadership and technical assistance on
behaviour change world-wide. To develop and apply new, state-of-the-art
techniques for behaviour change that will increase the impact,
sustainability, scale and cost-effectiveness of interventions in child
health, maternal health, and nutrition.
As you are aware, for over 25 years of IE&C (information, education,
and communication) and social marketing interventions have resulted in
numerous solid successes for population, health, and nutrition pro-
grams. However, in a rapidly changing environment , significant gaps
between knowledge, the access to knowledge and behaviour still remain,
and key areas of behaviour change such as at the institutional, commu-
nity, and family levels have not been addressed. The CHANGE Project is
designed to develop and apply innovative new tools and approaches drawn
from the full range of disciplines in the field of applied behaviour
change to help programs close "knowledge-behaviour" gaps and address
behaviour change at many levels. Some of the new approaches being de-
veloped and applied by CHANGE include:
* tools to produce supportive policy and institutional environments
through techniques of structural or organisational change;
* techniques to accomplish group and community change through normative
and relational change approaches;
* improved techniques for individual behaviour change;
* improved approaches to social marketing;
* application of leading edge technologies in media and communication.
Basically, CHANGE works with USAID regional bureaux and field missions
to implement new behaviour change programs, and with existing co-
operating agencies such as yours and contractors to strengthen existing
programs by introducing and supporting new approaches. CHANGE also can
provide strategic review and guidance for existing programs and pro-
grams under development.
The CHANGE partnership with USAID is through a co-operative agreement
and through USAID Mission contributions. CHANGE is implemented in part-
nership with USAID-financed collaborating agencies and can work with
other international donors and both U.S. based and local PVO's. When
working with PVO's, CHANGE project funds can be used to supplement ex-
isting project staffing and other direct costs to these organisations
as needed within the context of a CHANGE project intervention.
Although CHANGE is a new project we have been involved with several ac-
tivities in Africa. For example in Ghana we are trying to implement is
a reproductive health educational activity for the youth through the
internet. The goal is to develop a project and activity that would be
based in schools in Ghana and the use and develop a channel for inter-
national peer teaching between the school participants. Another project
that was implemented under Populations Communication Services and the
Academy for Educational Development was the development of the Ministry
of Healths integrated health tool kit for Community Health Workers.
This lead to the development of an African Regional Tool kit that is
available in line. You can access it at:
http://www.jhuccp.org/tools/
As to the use of telemedicine at the village or clinic level... we are
very interested in accessing, support and developing these activities
in support of the Global Polio Eradication Program that we are partici-
pating with. In addition to making disease identification materials
available to community health works we feel that participating in,
strengthening the use of village telecommunication activities at all
level would be of extreme benefit to the surveillance, reporting and
monitoring of the polio program. This in addition to all the other
health related activities that could be supported.
Indeed I believe that we might be able to achieve our mutual goals
through some sort of a partnership. As I have stated we are extremely
interested in partnering with NGOs and PVO programs.
Please feel free to contact me if you have suggestions or ideas. I look
forward to hearing from you and developing a potential working rela-
tionship.
Yours truly,
Benedict Tisa
Senior Program Officer
CHANGE Project
Academy For Educational Development
1825 Connecticut Ave., NW
Washington, DC, USA 20009
Tel: +1-202-884-8155
Fax: +1-202-884-8792
mailto:btisa@aed.org
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