The Videos Saving Lives in the Developing World

Uncharted Ground With SSIR

This is the first episode of a two-part series about raising the quality of health care in the developing world.

Deb Van Dyke, a nurse practitioner for Doctors Without Borders, grew increasingly troubled over 15 years by the low quality of care provided by local health workers around Asia and Africa. So she set up Global Health Media, an international video production house, to make instructional videos customized for the developing world. They have since been used to train more than one million health workers, transforming the way frontline caregivers are learning essential skills and helping them save lives.

This episode traces the journey of Van Dyke and Peter Cardellichio, the associate director of Global Health Media, as they built the organization from:

• Van Dyke’s earliest inspirations in South Sudan (0:06) and Afghanistan (10:25);
• to their first disastrous film shoot in the Dominican Republic (13:36);
• and to the eventual success of their videos in more than 200 countries (20:38).

Along the way, we learn about:

• the crisis of frontline health care quality from Dr. Raj Panjabi, co-founder of Last Mile Health (7:46);
• how Van Dyke creates the videos to maximize impact for health workers (15:54);
• and why the videos have become so cherished by frontline workers, such as neonatal specialist Dr. Josh Bress (19:38) and S.D. Nyoni, a nurse inZimbabwe (24:16).

Additional Resources:

• Global Health Media videos described in the episode:
• • The Position of the Baby
  • Helping Babies Breathe at Birth
• Research from third-party field organizations on the impact of the videos in Malaysia, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Rwanda

The full transcript of the episode can be found at https://ssir.org/podcasts/category/unchartedground.