Advice and such for sources for African health care professionals/students

Written by Flahiff, Janice [Janice.Flahiff@UTOLEDO.EDU]

Hello all,

Upcoming travel plans seem to be firming up for a 3 week stay in Liberia (this May!) focusing on service projects.
I will be traveling with the Friends of Liberia, spending a week each at 2 hospitals up country with
the Health/Medical contingent. My colleagues are mostly health care professionals (nurses and
a psychologist).

Neither hospital is connected with the HINARI program, and it is not feasible to introduce HINARI at this time.
However, both hospitals do have Internet connections (when there is sufficient electricity!).

I am in the process of collecting free relevant Web sites. One of the coordinators of our group
is in contact with the hospital directors at both sites. She said both hospital directors see this
project of gathering Web sites along with a short workshop on finding good health information
on the Internet to be of value to them. The coordinator (a nurse) and I have agreed that de.lic.ious
is the way to go.(We are both familiar with it). The Web site or sites will be something to leave them with,
and it opens the way for future collaboration, albeit long distance.

The site is at http://delicious.com/GantaHospital (and will be modified for the Zorzor hospital)
Presently have 60 bookmarks, aiming for about 100.

The Ganta Hospital focus will be nursing students and their instructors. There is a great need for the basics (how to monitor blood pressure,
identity heart and bowel sounds, develop DDx, judicious use of antibiotics, post surgery infection prevention.

The Zorzor Hospital focus will be midwifery (students and their instructors).

Sound and video sites are OK, but I need to augment with text/minimal images because bandwidth and electricity
are not optimal at times.

So far I have started "harvesting" from at least some of the following (and a big thank you to HINARI for including many of these in one
of their modules)
*Source Bibliographic Database: International Health and Disabilityh (http://asksource.info/res_library.htm
*INTUTE at http://www.inute.ac.uk/healthandlifesicences/omnilost.html
*Karolinska pages on Diseases, Nursing, etc [this is great!]
*CDC pages
*considering National Guideline Clearinghouse
*NN/NLM nursing resource page
*Martindale's Health Science Guide (great resource for nursing related videos)
*Scirus.com (found some fairly decent blood pressure monitoring guides for students)
*Medical student.com (starting to go through this)
*TRIP database (thinking about this)
*PubMedCentral (for the instructors)
*mining WWW for free African-centered journals

At this point, I wonder if I am reinventing the wheel.
If any of you have the time and advice in sources to mine for the de.lic.ious site, it would be greatly appreciated.

I am very appreciative of the newsletter. That is how I found out about HINARI.

Thank you in advance for "listening"