OutREach workshop
On the 25th of April, 23 students from different high schools
came to HKUST to attend a workshop held about global health and to try out the
software SIGHT team was building. Software team members have been working very
hard for the past few weeks to organize this workshop.
After the students arrived, a short discussion on global health took place. The students were asked what global health is and what the problems global health was facing are. The students came up with several issues that many developing countries faced, such as the lack of sanitation, starvation and various other diseases such as HIV. Some groups even brought up that the lack of professionals such as doctors and programmers along with the unstable political system of such countries added towards the poor health condition in developing countries.
Prior to trying out the new software SIGHT team has built, the students received a short introduction to the problems One-2-One, SIGHT's partner in Cambodia, faced. The problems focused around the use of paper records. The students quickly saw the problems One-2-One faced with a simulation of One-2-One's daily operations. Some of the problems the students identified were the difficulty of searching for a specific record in a large collection of paper records and the maintenance of paper records in Cambodia's unfavourable and unpredictable weather conditions.
After the strenuous tasks of having to search through all paper records to find a single record, the students were introduced to the new software SIGHT team members were working on. Students who volunteered to be doctors received white coats to put on and those who were patients were given fictional patient records. One of the reasons why SIGHT decided to host this workshop was to find any weaknesses in the software. So to make the activity more fun, there was a competition on how many bugs they could find in the software.
Overall, the workshop was a success. But there were several challenges SIGHT members faced throughout the workshop. "The most challenging part was probably teaching the students to use the software." Says Sandra, a software implementation team member, "We have been working with it for four months so all the functions are obvious to us. For this, we had to gain perspective and try to imagine we are seeing it for the first time. It was challenging but a great training before we do the same in Cambodia" Another member, Lance, who is on the coding team comments "We know that the system will obviously better than paper record, but when I actually recorded the time needed for a patient to go through one station and saw that it is indeed better. It gave me a great sense of achievement"
Indeed, global health is a big issue. However, these big problems can be easily tackled with simple technologies. SIGHT looks forward to developing more sustainable and executable simple technologies for global health in the future.
After the students arrived, a short discussion on global health took place. The students were asked what global health is and what the problems global health was facing are. The students came up with several issues that many developing countries faced, such as the lack of sanitation, starvation and various other diseases such as HIV. Some groups even brought up that the lack of professionals such as doctors and programmers along with the unstable political system of such countries added towards the poor health condition in developing countries.
Prior to trying out the new software SIGHT team has built, the students received a short introduction to the problems One-2-One, SIGHT's partner in Cambodia, faced. The problems focused around the use of paper records. The students quickly saw the problems One-2-One faced with a simulation of One-2-One's daily operations. Some of the problems the students identified were the difficulty of searching for a specific record in a large collection of paper records and the maintenance of paper records in Cambodia's unfavourable and unpredictable weather conditions.
After the strenuous tasks of having to search through all paper records to find a single record, the students were introduced to the new software SIGHT team members were working on. Students who volunteered to be doctors received white coats to put on and those who were patients were given fictional patient records. One of the reasons why SIGHT decided to host this workshop was to find any weaknesses in the software. So to make the activity more fun, there was a competition on how many bugs they could find in the software.
Overall, the workshop was a success. But there were several challenges SIGHT members faced throughout the workshop. "The most challenging part was probably teaching the students to use the software." Says Sandra, a software implementation team member, "We have been working with it for four months so all the functions are obvious to us. For this, we had to gain perspective and try to imagine we are seeing it for the first time. It was challenging but a great training before we do the same in Cambodia" Another member, Lance, who is on the coding team comments "We know that the system will obviously better than paper record, but when I actually recorded the time needed for a patient to go through one station and saw that it is indeed better. It gave me a great sense of achievement"
Indeed, global health is a big issue. However, these big problems can be easily tackled with simple technologies. SIGHT looks forward to developing more sustainable and executable simple technologies for global health in the future.
