Identifying opportunities and recommendations for change: VxData Insights Workshops
How we will validate our knowledge, identify opportunities for intervention and co-design recommendations for change in the immunization programs in Kenya, Mozambique and DRC.
This story is part of a blog series sharing insights from a Human-Centered Design research study of the immunization program in Kenya, Mozambique and the DRC in 2020. Please read the previous stories for more context on the work as well as insights from this research.
Since the beginning of 2020 and over three countries, we have been conducting a research study, a joint effort between Sonder Collective and John Snow Inc. (JSI), to understand challenges around collecting and using data for decision-making in delivering immunization services. We conducted interviews with healthcare workers and managers at all levels of the EPI system in Kenya, Mozambique and DRC, in their place of work and observed immunization activities at the health facilities. Along the way we faced a changing world, with the COVID-19 pandemic, in which we had to adapt the way we led our Human-Centered Research project. With research done in all three countries, our team is currently planning a series of virtual workshops to engage local and global stakeholders to discuss opportunities for impact and change based on key findings and challenges uncovered at various levels of the healthcare system.
Our approach, called Human-Centered Design, is especially effective at uncovering root causes behind systemic problems and translating them into actionable insights that can inform future products, services, and interventions. By engaging with individuals in the context of their daily lives, taking time to understand their experiences, motivations, and daily struggles, we examined the system anew from a user-biased perspective and took the time to really understand their challenges and the root causes behind those challenges.
Ultimately, we have uncovered and prioritized data-specific pain points and challenges that healthcare workers and managers at all levels within a country encounter in delivering immunization services in Kenya, the DRC, and Mozambique. The results of this study will be used by global, local and health level actors to design innovative, user-centered interventions addressing the behavioral and systemic challenges to the effective collection, management and use of immunization data for better service delivery and health outcomes. But with the myriad of observations collected across 3 countries, what are our opportunities and specific ideas for intervention?
We believe the best solutions are those that are driven by the users, the humans that are experiencing the challenges themselves and are directly affected by them. So in each country, we are planning workshops, spread over 3 days, to bring together health system actors across all levels of the immunization programs, local and global partners, technical experts and design researchers and facilitators to:
Validate the challenges and their root causes identified during the research
- Identify opportunity areas for each country
- Co-create recommendations to overcome key data-use barriers for the most important, least addressed challenges as identified by the users themselves
Co-designing through user-centered workshops
Over 3 workshop sessions in each country, we aim to encourage voices from various levels of the system to be heard and to actively participate in informing the global immunization strategy for years to come. Due to COVID-19, and taking into consideration health guidelines, our workshops will be run via Zoom. During these sessions we will use a design tool called Miro, where participants can engage with content and activities being created in real-time during each session and have a virtual workshop space where our progress will be documented over time across the 3 sessions. We have kept all workshop sessions to only 2.5 hours in length, taking into consideration the work and strain that immunization teams across the continent are currently experiencing.
Session 1- Validate: Challenges and Root Cause Analysis
In our first session, we will revisit the project objectives, reflect on our research journey so far by sharing what we have heard and learnt along the way. This will ground all participants in our current context and lay the foundations for success.
Our team has organized the challenges we have heard and seen from participants and created 8 Root Cause Analysis Fishbone diagrams. These diagrams illustrate the major challenges as well as causes, immunization programs are facing. These root causes were mapped against 2 main factors that contributed to the low utilization of data for decision making: that there was low ability in the system to utilize data as well as low motivation to utilize data for decision making. Using these visualizations, participants will take the important step of reflecting on the challenges and their causes, if they correspond to existing or planned efforts in the country and validate or question the findings. Through this analysis, the team will identify gaps and areas of interest to pursue in the next session.
Session 2- Identify: Identify Opportunity Spaces for Intervention
For this session, we will bring together a smaller working group, to really roll up their sleeves and help us identify the major gaps and opportunities for intervention that we will focus on in the following session.
Session 3- Address: Developing Recommendations/Solutions to address the Key Opportunities
The larger group will come back together for this session where the three days will culminate in the co-creation of recommendations by participants to address the opportunity spaces that were mapped and organized in the previous smaller working session. In small break out groups, participants will have the chance to participate in drafting solutions to increase the ability and motivation of healthcare workers and managers and address the data related challenges they have been facing in their various immunization programs. Coming together, they will present their top solutions, and through a gamified exercise, rank these solutions based on their relative impactfulness and feasibility.
The Future of VxData Insights
Ultimately, at the end of these workshops across Kenya, Mozambique and DRC, we will be able to tell a well-rounded story, using the voices of health system actors across every level of the immunization program in each country. We will package real stories, data challenges and their causes, opportunity spaces and the potential solutions ranked by potential impact and implementation feasibility to tell the often untold narratives around using data for decision making by the healthcare actors that are experiencing them across the system. This can now be used by local and global partners, funders and respective Ministries of Health in each country to create long-lasting change and shape the future of data use and decision making in immunization programs for years to come.
The virtual workshops will commence this week for Kenya and will take place for Mozambique and the DRC in August and September. Stay tuned for more information on outputs and key takeaways in future blog posts.
This story was written by Sarah Hassanen
From more insights from this study, stay tuned for additional stories in this blog series.
