Health Care on Air Pacific: Building Frontline Health Worker Confidence and Skills during COVID-19
Launched: August 2024
By Yumiko Shinya, Innovation Specialist
Frontline health workers (FHW) play a crucial role in delivering promotive, preventive, curative, and rehabilitative primary health care (PHC) services. To do so, they need to be equipped with the most up-to-date health knowledge and skills in order to deliver effective PHC services to the communities they serve.
The Pacific is home to 5,861 qualified nurses and midwives providing health services to 2.45 million culturally diverse people living on more than 660 islands. The majority of FHWs are in remote rural areas and outer islands where both phone and internet connectivity are, at best, constrained.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, a plethora of new guidance for prevention, treatment, care and adaption of routine services was and continues to be released. One of the greatest challenges is how to provide primary health care FHWs with the knowledge, skills, confidence and guidance on managing COVID-19 infections and continuing to deliver quality essential health services to the most remote and vulnerable populations.
To address this challenge, UNICEF Pacific, in conjunction with the Joint Incident Management Team Training Pillar, the Pacific Community, the Pacific Island News Association and the Pacific Heads of Nursing has launched Health Care on Air Pacific, a distance health education program for health workers.
This initiative uses radio and other communication platforms to motivate the PHC workforce, by instilling confidence, and to provide guidance and align with quality instruction on delivering services during COVID-19 that are comparable to face-to-face formats. UNICEF and partners have developed a broadcasting plan of 41 episodes on radio.
Participating health workers will have the opportunity to ask questions, share learning needs and receive episode summaries through UNICEF’s RapidPro platform to enable two-way communications using SMS, Facebook Messenger and Viber. Additionally, recordings and scripts of the episodes are available on a dedicated password-protected page of the Internet of Good Things (IoGT) platform. Launched in July 2020, with the support from UNICEF, the governments of the United States, New Zealand, and Japan have been airing the episodes over the last six months.
The programme aims to equip 60% of FHWs in the Pacific with the knowledge, skills and confidence they need to protect themselves and deliver the best quality of services during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Additionally, this distance-based learning programme supported governments to connect practising nurses and midwives with the opportunity to learn, share information, and incorporate the new WHO guidance on COVID-19.
Sr. Malia, Nursing Sister at the Princess Fusipala Hospital in Ha’apai
Sr. Malia, Nursing Sister at the Princess Fusipala Hospital in Ha’apai, Tonga and one of the many healthcare workers who joined the radio programme stated:
“The Health Care on Air programme will help us to receive up-to-date information about COVID-19 even though we are located remotely on the island of Ha’apai. We will be well prepared to empower people to look after their health with our health promotion, preventative measures and quality services.”
Using RapidPro, users are able to gain accreditation points, and the Ministry of Health’s programme coordinators can track users’ participation and accreditation on the RapidPro website. This teaching and learning methodology, developed by UNICEF Pacific, will be sustained through the national nursing accreditation system for in-service professional development.
Additionally, this initiative has generated evidence on the usability of digital platforms to train FHWs in remote or hard-to-reach areas as well as allowed for an opportunity to assess whether radio coupled with mobile phone follow-up is an effective learning medium for remote health workers.
For more information, contact: Yumiko Shinya, Innovation Specialist, UNICEF Pacific, Frances Vulivuli, Health & Nutrition Specialist, UNICEF Pacific or Karin Kallander, Senior Health Specialist, UNICEF HQ