Our very own health education videos...

The Mercy Ship's outpatient clinic’s mission is to serve as a primary care facility for the children of Aberdeen and greater Freetown. Most of what I do in the clinic is diagnosing/treating the sick children. However, this is not the only focus of the clinic. Most illnesses seen at the clinic are readily preventable, making health education an important part of the clinic’s mandate. We have also implemented the national immunization program to aid in the prevention of disease.

Due to the high patient load in the clinic, the nurses no longer have time to sit down and teach the patients/caretakers during clinic hours. This is unfortunate, because you can’t find a more perfect time to teach these parents- they are sitting with their sick child, waiting to see the doctor, and might not need to come for the same illness next time, if they know how to prevent it!

So, we came up with the brilliant idea of making our own educational videos. I chose two topics- diarrhea/ORS & malaria and wrote outlines for the skits. I then asked my national staff (3 nurses & a receptionist) to come up with a full script (in Krio) and present it to me in the form of a play. Our communications ‘officer’ filmed the plays, each at a different location in the Aberdeen community. After some hours of editing we soon found ourselves with 2 top-notch educational videos.

It was a great experience; fun to see it through from start to finish, entertaining to watch it being filmed, exciting to see the finished products. What can I say? I’m proud of my staff and I am sure this will be a great tool!


On the left- a patient of mine- who lives in this community and came to take a look!
On the right- one of our staff's relatives - who actually stars in the malaria video