Empowering Youth For Community Health Impact, the project is ongoing
This is a health impact project through youth effort. The project arose from issues I observed during my service at the Family Medicine Unit (now known as the Primary Health Care Center, which has a larger capacity and is expected to provide high-quality primary health care to economically disadvantaged parts of our community on a daily basis for approximately 200 patients) and clinical attachments at affiliated hospitals. During my service, I witnessed disparities in health care literacy in my communities, as well as improper and ineffective medication and medical equipment use, such as a metered-dose inhaler (MDI), which is a device that delivers a specific amount of medication to the lungs in the form of a short burst of aerosolized medicine that is typically self-administered by the patient via inhalation. (In our setup, it is the most often employed delivery device for treating asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and other respiratory disorders.)
Given the context of my observations, the project for the Millennium Fellowship entails addressing those observations through a collaborative project with students at my college. We intend to create fliers that contain health information in a language that our patients can understand (Amharic and Afan oromo) and covering the most commonly encountered health problems in our area. Another goal of the project is to produce demonstration videos on the use of metered-dose inhalers for asthmatic patients, diabetic foot self-examination, and medication advice for chronic noncommunicable diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and asthma. Our fliers and demonstration videos will be reviewed by experts in the field before being displayed on a screen in the waiting area, on social media platforms, and college websites.