SWB Project Highlight: Bridge to Health
Sloka Iyengar, PhD, past Director of Marketing and Communications at SWB (and current Secretary) talked to Fil Potempski, BSc, MPH, Programs Manager, Bridge to Health USA. This interview took place in August 2022. The video can be found here.
We are talking to Fil Potempski — his organization Bridge to Health did a project with SWB. We want to highlight the project and the work that Phil’s organization is doing.
Sloka: Welcome, Phil! We are so happy to have you here and talk about the work we have been doing together. Could you tell us a little bit about how you came across SWB, and how did you find us?
Fil: We had some gaps in the program that we were developing we needed some external help that included some translations, and some statistical assistance. We were looking around forums and seeing what kinds of services were available. There were some freelance services, and I stumbled across a forum that discussed SWB, they mentioned that SWB works on many interesting projects and that they are helping nonprofits. I visited the SWB website and sent an email asking if our project was something SWB would be interested in working with us.
Sloka: Could you tell us a little bit about your organization Bridge to Health? What does the organization do?
Fil: We have got the main kinds of components — one in the US and one in Canada. In the US, we’re a registered 501c3 organization; in Canada, we are a registered charity, and we do a lot of international health outreach, usually in the context of continuing medical education for practitioners. As an example, we will have we’ll have Canadian healthcare workers go to lower- and middle-income countries and provide education programs on ultrasound use. We also donate to partners in regional clinics or regional sites, and we have tried to scale that up a little bit. Right now, we are working on a program in Yemen where we are doing a similar thing but we’re doing the whole thing virtually. The virtual component is new for us, and that is what SWB helping us out with. SWB helped us develop a nice analysis plan for describing our outcomes from that project. We have partnered with the Amazon medical project, and we run a clinic off the Amazonian River in Peru. We have some local initiatives in the US and Canada where we’re working on implementing training programs for community health workers and linking them up with virtual practitioners so that people can have everything for their care at one site. It is all about streamlining the process of healthcare and making sure it is more accessible and available for people. That is prerogative with most of the work we do.
Sloka: Could you tell us a little bit more about the collaboration between SWB and Bridge to Health? How did this project advance your organization’s goals?
Fil: The biggest issue was that we didn’t have a very specific analysis plan in place for our dataset. We knew what kind of data we would have available to collect we just didn’t know how we would kind of extract it all and analyze it. The issue with working in any lower-and-middle-income country or a conflict zone (if we are talking about Yemen specifically), is that the accessibility to data is very sparse. We don’t have electronic medical records, so there is generally a lack of consistency in just even handwritten medical records. So, because we have these big gaps in data, we must be very creative with what data we have available, what data we are going to use, and how we are going to try and extract that data and tell the story of the program. That is where SWB came in. They helped us develop a strategy for being able to use that data in a way that we can use to exemplify where our program was succeeding, where it was having struggles, and how we can highlight all those things through the limited data we have.
Sloka: Could you tell us about the process of working with SWB? How was the process of doing the project itself and does anything stand out to you in that arena?
Fil: One thing that helps project momentum is having weekly team meetings and getting things off the ground. SWB volunteers Christian and Janet were great with that they were on board to get those weekly team meetings rolling, and so every week we would meet at the beginning of the week we’d have action items for the week we’d get those things done and then we would reconvene the next week re-evaluate where we were at and then continue. It was just fantastic; it was so smooth very professional and very easy to get things done. Even if there were hiccups, we’d have a shorter meeting and regroup next week. It was very easy to work with the organization, and very easy to get things done. Thank you so much! It was such a lovely experience all over working with SWB, and I hope we can continue to work together in the future!