Apps and Skits: Enabling New Forms of Village-To-Clinic Feedback for Rural Health Education

Abstract

We present the results of deploying a feedback mechanism in a community health education project, which enables rural-based nurses to elicit feedback from rural villages in order to improve their efforts in health education and service delivery in these areas. We implemented a mobile asynchronous-voice platform, through which Community Health Workers (CHWs) in rural Lesotho report previously unknown health challenges and knowledge gaps to the nurses, who then create new digital content and redesign service delivery to address these challenges. Beyond this, we also used role-play both as an additional feedback channel and a design tool. Our results demonstrate the combined benefits of implementing creative methods for effective human-to-technology and human-to-human communication in ways that enable new forms of expression; and highlight the importance of using role play in HCI4D contexts. We also present the benefits of incorporating an effective village-to-clinic feedback mechanism in health education programs.