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Reaching the Community: A comprehensive health education intervention among the Ngäbe-Buglé of Panama
Background: Over the last ten years the team members of the University of South Florida´s Panama Program has worked with the indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé population in the western region of Panama close to the Costa Rican border. The Ngäbe-Buglé is the largest indigenous population in Panama, facing extreme health disparities. Contributing factors to the health outcomes in this region include geography as a limitant to access (healthography), extreme poverty, malnutrition, low-literacy, high maternal and infant mortality, and increased domestic violence. The film focuses on a project designed to reach the Ngäbe-Buglé with tailored health education materials.
Description of Project: Culturally, linguistically, and literacy appropriate material was developed following community participatory processes and qualitative formative research. Promotores distributed the health messages to their communities using the tailored material. The topics include: hygiene, nutrition, environment, healthy pregnancy, the role of the midwife in the community, and domestic violence. Seventy-eight health promoters were trained. Of the 284,970 inhabitants of the Ngäbe-Buglé Comarca, 6,878 (36.1% male, 63.9% female) received the health education intervention. Additionally, Telemedicine experts trained 25 health professionals (medical doctors, nurses, medical records personnel, emergency room staff, radiology technicians) to improve the quality of the medical attention in remote areas.
Discussion: This documentary serves to describe the implementation of community participation in reaching an extremely hard-to-reach and vulnerable population. The research team explains their methodology and discusses each phase of the project. Addressing these topics equipped the community with the tools to deliver health messages and address health disparities cultivating community ownership and empowerment. This documentary was made to engage others about the health disparities among the indigenous communities in Panama, but also to share the successes of this intervention with other public health professionals to promote adoptability of this model in similar hard-to-reach and low-resource populations to address healthography issues.
Learning Areas:
Administer health education strategies, interventions and programsAdvocacy for health and health education
Diversity and culture
Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs
Public health or related education
Learning Objectives:
Demonstrate the improvement of health in the Ngäbe-Buglé population by training health promoters (Promotores) to deliver health education to the most hard-to-reach communities in the indigenous Comarca.
Depict the use of social marketing and participatory processes to develop a culturally, literacy, and linguistically appropriate and community relevant educational material.
Engage others about existing health disparities among the indigenous peoples of Panama.
Disseminate successes of this intervention among the public health community to promote adaptability and replicability of this model in other vulnerable, rural, hard-to-reach or low-resource vulnerable populations.
Illustrate through this film the importance of community participation to ensure ownership of intervention, sustainability, and empowerment outcomes.
Keyword(s): Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and, Social and behavioral sciences
Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am the PI in the grant and project for which this video was filmed. I have over 15 years of experience working in community public health settings. This project will provide health education to thousands of underserved members of the community in an international setting.
Any relevant financial relationships? No
I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.