Community and Collaboration: Up-Skilling and Empowering Local Volunteers
15th May 2023
The Faculty of Remote, Rural and Humanitarian Healthcare is delighted to deliver a joint webinar with dental training charity Bridge2Aid. This webinar will explore the importance of community and government involvement when designing and delivering oral healthcare programmes in remote and rural areas. Bridge2Aid, a UK based training charity, will present two programmes of activity in Malawi and Tanzania.
Overview
This webinar discusses the importance of collaboration with local communities and securing government involvement for projects that focus on improving health literacy and behaviours in remote and rural sub-Saharan Africa.
Speakers will discuss the benefits and barriers experienced from two projects and present learning points to take forward. The first project presented will cover a programme in North-West Tanzania that focused on changing behaviours around the traditional but disturbing practice of infant oral mutilation.
The second project will highlight a programme in Northern Malawi that empowered dental therapists to teach key oral health messages to volunteer oral health promoters. The trained volunteers were then able to cascade messages to their communities in remote and rural locations in Northern Malawi.
Aims
The webinar aims to:
- Raise awareness of the need for both north-south and south-south collaboration to empower local volunteers to improve health literacy and behaviours in challenging locations.
- Raise awareness of the benefits and barriers to successful volunteer empowerment in remote and rural areas.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this webinar the participant should be able to:
- Describe why collaboration is important in successful volunteer empowerment.
- List some of the main benefits to successful volunteer empowerment in remote and rural areas
- List some of the main barriers to successful volunteer empowerment in remote and rural areas
- Have awareness of the controversies around the traditional practice of infant oral mutilation
- Have an awareness of the steps needed to improve health literacy and behaviours in remote and rural locations and be able to apply these to different healthcare settings.
Panellists
This webinar will be chaired by Shaenna Loughanne; Former CEO and current Trustee of Bridge2Aid, and a member of the Faculty of Remote, Rural and Humanitarian Healthcare Faculty Advisory Board.
Our Panellists include:
- Andrew Paterson; Clinical Senior Lecturer & Honorary Consultant in Restorative Dentistry, University of Glasgow; Bridge2 Aid Trustee & Volunteer
- Dr Martha Chipanda; National Oral Health Coordinator, Malawi Ministry of Health; Lecturer in Oral Health, Kamuzu University of Health Sciences
- Paul Tasman; CEO, Bridge2Aid
- Dr Nila Jackson; General Dental Surgeon & Founder of Sibaba Dental Clinics in Mara, Tanzania; Partner of Bridge2Aid and Project Manager of the Stop IOM Programmes in Northern Tanzania.
CPD
1 Hour
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Recording
