A Change of Plans...

One thing you can count on in life – nothing goes according to plan. As much as I like to say I am free-spirited and spontaneous, at my core I, like my mother, like to stick to a schedule. However, the real world doesn’t work like that and I am testing my “flexibility” muscles as plans for the Kenya trip changed a little. Instead of departing on Monday, the trip has been delayed a week and I’ll now head out on June 1. The reasons are a little unclear but this is what it is and I’m going to roll with it. Admittedly, I’ve been a little bummed today but a week delay isn’t the end of the world and that gives me more time to spend with my family and friends in North Carolina – including my dog London!

On the work side of things, this delay gives me time to work with the Chapel Hill technical team to fine tune our tools for the PNA we’ll be working on in Kenya. (Bonus points to you my dear reader if you remember the acronym!) We’ve been testing them lately and the focus is lost in some of the data questions. In order to bring the tools more in-line with what we need them to really assess for us, we are restructuring them a little, which will take a bit of work. So, the Chapel Hill team is thrilled to have me working full-time on this next week. I think too I’ll feel better prepared to go out to Nairobi and use the tools by spending more time next week working and refining them (there are nearly a dozen) with the Chapel Hill team.

So let me pull back a moment for you dear friends who are reading this but have no idea what this assessment deal really is and why we are doing it. In public health, we need to do an assessment before planning and implementing any interventions or policies so that we make the right decisions to improve the health of communities. For example, if you wanted to reduce malaria in a district in a given country, you need to know the incidence of malaria and how it is or isn’t treated. You’d want to know who else was working to reduce malaria in that district and what kind of infrastructure is there to help you if you launch a program. While we are not working at reducing malaria specifically in Kenya, we are working to improve how health workers are trained. So our assessment objectives are to look at pre-service, in-service and continued professional development training systems and identify performance gaps, assess perceptions of all the key players such as faculty and students, and identify best practices as potential interventions to improve the performance of training systems throughout the country. This includes the training of clinical officers, nurses, midwives etc. We are doing this by using our “tools” to collect data from all different players involved in the training and deployment of health workers. It is a massive undertaking but think of the changes that we can make once we get a clear picture of what needs to be improved upon to even better train the country’s healthcare workers. This will only make Kenyans’ healthier and improve the job satisfaction of the country’s health work force. However, my beloved Kenya will have to wait just one more week before I physically hit the ground running!