Program Design and Management Conference

Two weeks ago, Peace Corps held a conference for all Guy 23 volunteers on program design and management. We were supposed to attend with our counterparts and discuss, plan, and design a project or program that we were currently working on or hoped to work on at our site. Unfortunately, my counterpart, the Medex at the Maternal and Child Health clinic, was unable to attend but I was still able to come up with a potential project.

Since I am doing my Peace Corps service as part of my Master's International program, I wanted to design a project that would not only be something that my health center needed and wanted but that would also be able to serve as part of my master's thesis when I get back. Graduating from grad school seems both blissfully far away and terrifyingly close so I knew I needed to start thinking about it sooner rather than later.

Since starting work at the maternal and child health clinic I've become more interested in antenatal health and I think I want to go into that field when I'm back home. I wanted my project to focus on the pregnant women who attend the clinic and, as I observed the women's consultations with the Medex and spoke to them one on one, I realized that nutrition during pregnancy is a major issue for women here in Guyana. There is a definite lack of education about nutrition, what pregnant women should or should not eat, what makes up a healthy diet, and what vitamins one should take while pregnant. I wanted my project to focus on nutrition education, both in pregnant women and also in community health workers so that they could better serve their own communties.

From that very basic idea, I put together a rough project outline which I hope to begin sometime in early October. I am going to select a group of 20 women who are new admits to our antenatal clinic in the month of October. I will give out an initial survey that focuses on determining their level of knowledge about nutrition in general, how that changes when they are pregnant, and what vitamins a pregnant woman needs in order to have a healthy baby. This will serve as my baseline survey. From there, I will follow these women for 9 months, or the full term of their pregnancy, giving them group and individual health talks that focus on nutrition, at every clinic visit. For women up till 6 months of pregnancy, that will be once a month and for women after 7 months, it will be about once every 2 weeks. I will focus these health talks on different topics pertaining to nutrition. After each women gives birth I will do a follow up  survey to see if their knowledge of nutrition has improved. Also, I will check to see medically if they have improved health by taking vitamins during pregnancy, focusing specifically on infant birth weight and other signs of poor antenatal nutrition.

So that, in a very basic and rough nutshell, is my first project as a Peace Corps volunteer. It is something I am excited about starting and I hope that by educating the health workers as well, it is a project that is at least somewhat sustainable. And by doing a survey and generating statistical data on how many women's knowledge and overall health improved, it will be useful for when I go back to school and have to turn all this into a nice, formal paper.

Let me know what you guys all think!! I am hoping to get some feedback from my many followers on whether or not you think this project is even a good idea :)