Interventions: Community Micro-training Videos
By Jason Walton, change management lead, BID Initiative
Oct 29, 2014
In an effort to build on momentum being gained within PATH, the Better Immunization Data (BID) Initiative is leveraging a project that is bringing micro-training videos to targeted communities. More specifically, Projecting Health is a community-led, video-driven approach that empowers the communities to identify, develop and produce their own videos to foster the adoption of desired behaviors. This approach has gained traction in India and Ethiopia where it is used to address challenges in maternal and newborn health and in Kenya and Mozambique where it focuses on early childhood development.
The BID Initiative intends to translate this community-based approach to one that targets health workers and administrators within ministries of health. We will incorporate the core components of local content identification, development and production as it relates to immunizations, data use and data quality within the health system. The BID Initiative will also work within Tanzania and Zambia to assess different strategies on disseminating the micro-training videos. Current options include handheld projectors, computers (where available) and cellphones. We are very interested to see what unsolicited dissemination and sharing of these videos occurs between colleagues, facilities and district offices, which will speak to the scalability of this intervention.
The content of the micro-training videos will initially be identified by district-level user advisory groups that serve as champions for the BID Initiative within the targeted regions. They will work to identify promising practices surrounding the use of data, improving the quality of data and the ability to transform data into meaningful information. Going forward, the intention is to have the resources and knowledge available at the district level to enable health workers and ministry of health staff to identify a promising practice and work in collaboration with the district to develop the short micro-training videos.
A few questions will quickly arise regarding the translation of the success being achieved by Projecting Health into the context of the BID Initiative:
- How important is the familiarity with the individuals captured in the videos a key to a video’s success? Moreover, how portable is a video from one district to another or one region to another?
- How much interest and commitment will be garnered for the local identification of promising practices and the resulting time and effort required to produce videos?
- As opposed to cross-site visits that provide the opportunity to have a two-way conversation with a colleague, how successful will the uptake of the message from the micro-training video be if the communication flow is one directional?
- As successful dissemination models are identified, will they prove to be cost-effective?
- How can we foster peer networks to support the dissemination of these videos and to help foster communication amongst colleagues surrounding the videos, thus improving the scale at which these are viewed?
- Will this iteration of micro-training videos attain similar success in impacting knowledge, update of practices and capacity building that Projecting Health is realizing within its community context?
Each is a challenge in its own right, but ones that we will work to test, monitor and further address as we iterate the interventions to account for the evidence and feedback that is generated within the countries.
Projecting Health: Revolutionizing Behavior Change Communication