IN AFRICA a text message can save lives and cost less than a doctor. These are the paradoxes of a continent where, in some areas, the patients have no access to health facilities equipped and the simple technology of a water pump is futuristic as it may be a spaceship, but in which mobile phones have a widespread distribution but not yet fast.
Thus, the Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemry) decided to exploit the mobile phone and text messages to more easily reach health professionals in remote areas and help them in their work, an initiative that has had amazing results, so much to be cited by prestigious scientific journal The Lancet. The information came via text message to nurses are in fact served to treat it right 24 per cent more cases and have proved most effective and economical training courses or papers.
To understand how a simple text message sent on the phone a nurse can help save a life one must consider not only the limited resources of health in Africa, but also of its nature, completely different from ours.
Hospitals, clinics, clinics are few and unreachable for a large portion of the population, therefore, when possible, health facilities educate nurses who move from village to village by creating "traveling clinics" in which it is prevention, istreat common diseases, care is given first aid and organized transfers of the most seriously ill in hospital.
The work of nurses at home is heavy, often undertaken after careful and thorough training as possible in countries where the funds for training of health personnel are limited or nil. The Kemry, governmental structure, which has among its objectives the very formation of these job profiles, so he designed a method for nurses to follow and help Kenyans after school, starting an SMS service to remind some basic principles of therapy and the most common procedures, such as malaria. The initiative's success was surprising, with an improvement of 24 percent of malaria cases treated fairly. In practice, 24 percent more lives saved.
It was enough to send SMS on mobile phones of health personnel such as "Recommended for mothers of children with malaria, to finish all doses of medicine, even if the child feels better after taking the first", or other information useful to reiterate nurses were studied in vocational courses. SMS to "technical" were also interspersed with motivational text messages, like "A smile will do, will always bring something good in return," to make the service less cold and detached.
The cost of SMS has been amply repaid by the results and proved less expensive media commonly used for professional development, such as courses to support or printed material for distribution at health centers posted. The cost of each SMS in Kenya is less than a penny, but the processed data in the study of the Kenya Medical Research Institute, assisted by Oxford Biomedical Research Institute, indicated that - while sending text messages for a total of 39 thousand euros - the spending for the initiative was far less than the costs that would be needed for teachers in the country to travel or send material for the update.
In any case, text messages have proved far more useful for nurses who visited 2269 119 children with malaria compared with refresher courses or new books. And, researchers are fond of emphasizing, things can still improve, because in the six months following the monitoring referred to in the article published in The Lancet, text messages have become increasingly accurate and pleasing.
Source repubblica.it
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