Building Partnerships for Health

What keeps me busy these days is connecting, organizing, and collaborating.  It's not easy to be a people person.  You have to cultivate your patience, tolerance and the skill to make people comfortable.  It's a habit you develop and improve everyday you meet new people.  #HealthXPH has taught me how to be kind to strangers and how to connect with people who are different from you.  Based on the connectivist theory, you learn in the digital age not just within the individual but within and across networks.  Connectivism sees knowledge as a network and learning as a process of pattern recognition.  Every Saturday, we learn how to be gracious and as the participants how their week was, and to introduce yourself and be conscious of one another's mental health.  Through this process, we build communities.

This process of building communities online has taught me how to effectively build communities offline.  You see, I am a government employee and working in a patient-congested tertiary government hospital with a lot of maternal deaths motivated me to organize periodic meetings with stakeholders from referring institutions like provincial and city hospitals.  Initially, we presented our needs and solicited suggestions for improvement and how the stakeholders could help us improve our health service delivery.  From there we proceeded to lay down our cards to become accountable for our performance, where each hospital presented their own accomplishment reports and best practices.  No blaming, no name-calling, but with constructive criticism to help each other improve to reduce maternal mortality.  We all agreed that the apex hospital cannot do it alone, we each should contribute to achieving the same goal of reducing maternal mortality.  Here was a prime example of building partnerships toward one common goal: to reduce maternal mortality.

Last May 2018, the Association of Medical Colleges of the Philippines (APMC) urged each medical school to develop its own HIV program.  This spurred a move to coordinate with HIV coordinators of each medical school to link them to the HIV treatment hubs and social hygiene clinics as well as community-based organizations, to unify the efforts for HIV advocacy campaigns.  This lead to the development of the informal group called #TEACHCebu which stands for "Targeting Enhanced Awareness and Control of HIV in Cebu".

We were able to organize an HIV Forum with free HIV counseling and testing for medical students for each of the six (6) medical schools in Cebu.   By December 1, 2018, we will be launching "KAAMBAG (meaning partnership): together we TEACH..." an HIV Congress for Healthcare Professionals on December 1, 2018 at the Cebu Doctors' University auditorium.  We hope that this is the first of many successful unified efforts to increase HIV awareness among service providers to reduce stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV.

These are just some personal experiences in building partnerships to achieve health-related goals. 

Share experiences of building partnerships and collaborating with other groups for health-related goals.  What are the benefits and challenges of working together toward one health-related goal? What is the role of social media in building partnerships for health?