Monday and Tuesday were devoted to presenting our seventh annual Ilula Minnesota International HealthCare Conference. This conference brings us together with our colleagues from across southern Tanzania to learn together, share best practices, make friends, and develop quality improvement plans that teams take back home to implement at their hospital. From each of 28 hospitals we invite one doctor, one nurse and one pharmacist and one administrator. They come as a team and together develop quality improvement plans based on what they learned. This is a great way for us to leave a lasting impact even after we return home. All our presenters did a great job and all the healthcare professional teams that attended gave positive feedback.
This year we heard a presentation from a hospital team who attended last year and completed their quality improvement project during the year. By completing their project on improving management of labor they were able to reduce neonatal mortality by 58%, saving over 50 lives. We were all inspired to hear the impact that these quality improvement projects can have.
Our first course was presented in January 2014 with 30 attendees. Based on extremely positive feedback from the initial conference, our partners in Tanzania encouraged us to significantly expand the conference to offer this educational experience to a much larger audience of caregivers. As a result, we expanded the 2015 conference to include all 28 Southern Zone Lutheran Hospitals and hosted 100 professionals. As the conference has grown we have included staff from local nursing schools and local medical authorities. Again this year we hosted over 130 Tanzanian health care professionals at the conference.
Our conference is based on 5 principles:
1. Lifelong Learning. We believe all professionals should contribute to a culture of learning and continuously learn to improve our practice. We include students and residents in preparation and presentation of the conference.
2. Interprofessional teamwork. We include nursing, pharmacy, administrators, and physicians in both the attendance and presentations. We emphasize teamwork throughout the conference. We each bring unique knowledge and skills to share; specifically Tanzanian presenters emphasize tropical medicine and HIV, American presenters emphasize the growing global problem of chronic and non-communicable diseases.
3. Mutual Respect. We emphasize the ability for all our participants to teach and learn from each other, in spite of our differences in practice setting, culture, and socioeconomic situation. We include local leaders in planning the conference and select topics based on feedback from participants. Presentations are delivered by both US and Tanzanian professionals. We adhere to the highest international standards in the preparation of the educational content and accreditation of the program. The program is based on a foundation of a longstanding and ongoing relationship.
4. Continuous improvement. Learning should drive improvement in practice. We include planning sessions for participants to complete planning documents based on learnings to institute improvement plans upon returning to home hospitals.
5. Sustainable Impact. We believe that education and improvement are some of the most valuable ways to promote a sustainable positive impact on the health of our partners’ communities.
Our conference is accredited by the Education Department at the M Health Fairview to provide participants with Education credits for participation in this program.
Funding for the course is provided through generous contributions from several foundations and individuals including Global Health Ministries and the Peter King Family Foundation. All funds raised go entirely to hosting the conference, and support for local Tanzanian staff to attend, including meals, travel and lodging expenses. We want to sincerely thank all our donors, without their generosity, the course would not be possible.
Overall the conference was a great chance to learn together, build relationships, and plan together to improve healthcare in Tanzania. I hope we can do it again for many years to come.
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