Article: by Ryan Hyland Photo by Khaula Jamil
Rotary International and its local partners give mobile phones to healthcare workers in Nigeria and Pakistan.
As polio eradication efforts garner success, the focus is now on more remote areas and front-line healthcare workers are the first line of defense in reporting and treatment.
"Community health workers in Pakistan have received more than 800 phones through a partnership with Rotary, the Pakistani government; Telenor, the country’s second-largest telecommunications provider; and Eycon, a data monitoring and evaluation specialist. Organizers plan to distribute a total of 5,000 cellphones by the end of 2018. Health workers use the phones to send data via text message to a central server. If they see a potential polio case, they can immediately alert officials at Pakistan’s National Emergency Operations Center."
"Nigeria is also using cell-based mapping technology to identify areas that polio immunization teams have missed. “Traditional paper reporting was misleading our program. The information we were getting was not entirely accurate. This gave us the sense that we were doing better than we actually were,” says Boniface Igomu, program coordinator of Rotary’s Nigeria PolioPlus Committee. “With cellphones, we’re identifying problem areas quickly and acting accordingly.”
Health workers also are using mobile phones to monitor a multitude of maternal and child health factors.
Source: Rotary International
To read entire article click on link: https://www.rotary.org/en/cellphones-help-disease-eradication
