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Nudging is a slippery business. Here’s a primer to help get you started with your design for better health decisions.
Designing settings and scenarios in which people make healthy choices requires presenting those choices in a way that takes the all-too-human side of decision making into account. People need (and want) choices, but they also need (and want) help—a nudge—when they’re not sure what to do.
The Changemakers community has big ideas for improving the quality of and access to health care around the globe. From using technology creatively to giving children a leadership role in preventive care, solutinos abound. Hundreds of innovations from around the world are here on Changemakers.
Rubina is a physician’s assistant in a hospital emergency department and is studying for her Master’s in Public Administration. A native of Pakistan, she plans to spearhead preventive health care strategies in Southeast Asia. Rubina has nominated 13 projects in the Improved Nutrition competition.
The Changemakers community has big ideas for supporting positive rural development around the globe. From farming “affinity groups” in India to technologically connected health care providers in remote corners of the United States, solutions abound. See some of the best initiatives here
The website Maternova.net, one of two early entry prizewinners in the Healthy Mothers, Strong World competition, promotes technologies for maternal and neonatal health such as a solar-powered headlamp that provides ample light for night deliveries, or a calibrated bag that measures blood loss during labor. Maternova provides simple solutions with transformative possibilities for developing communities by shedding light on the latest technologies and giving professionals a go-to site for inspiration.
Tiyatien Health, a winner in the Rethinking Mental Health competition, is treating the effects of decades of brutal war in Liberia by training non-doctor health workers and clinicians to work directly with citizens of one of the poorest countries on Earth. The founders are survivors of Liberia's civil war and people living with HIV/AIDS.
Tiyatien Health trained the first non-physicians to administer anti-retroviral therapy in Liberia,and provided the first-ever HIV/AIDS treatments in southeastern Liberia, the poorest corner of the country. Now it is expanding beyond providing public HIV/AIDS treatment to rural communities by working to reverse decades of untreated depression and epilepsy.
Anne Marie Paolucci is the third generation of her family to be diagnosed with breast cancer, and she understands exactly what chemotherapy patients need to deal with experience and its side effects. “That knowledge cost me a lot to get," she notes, adding that she founded Chemo Comfort, a volunteer-run organization that provides Chemo Comfort Kits to meet those needs.
For a year now, Nick Pearson has been preparing the launch of his first model, mobile maternal health clinic in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, where 100,000 women give birth each year. Most deliver at home with an unskilled birth attendant or go to a public facility where conditions are often appalling.
“Our ambition is to change the way maternity care is provided for the more than one million poor women giving birth each year in urban East Africa,” said Pearson, the founder of Jacaranda Health. “We aim to become the largest provider of affordable maternity care in the region, and more importantly raise the standard of care among other private and public providers.”
Rather than dying of rare diseases, “pregnant women In hospitals around the world are dying of things we already know how to treat," said obstetrician Dr. Laura Stachel.
“I can’t go on with my life and not work on this. I had no idea how bad it was, and many others didn’t know either. I feel it is my job to become the voice for these women, because this kind of situation shouldn’t be allowed.”
I realized that all my years of clinical experience were useless in a situation where there was no light to perform a delivery or surgery, and no phone system to call a skilled doctor.
Andre Blackman is an agent of change and innovation within the public health community. He is very passionate about the role of new media, mobile technology and other useful innovations as it relates to health communications and public health in general – resulting in Public Health 2.0. Andre feels that public health and new media are focused on the people, so there should be parallels to how they both interact.
