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Fiona Mulhearn 00:17
Welcome to Contain This. I'm Fiona Mulhearn, a Director in the Global Health Division at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of country throughout Australia and our region. We recognise the continuing connection to land, waters, and community and pay our respects to Elders past and present.
Our department is proud to partner with the Australian Volunteers Program to provide an additional workforce to Pacific and Southeast Asian partner governments and organisations in the field of health. After a pause due to the pandemic, the program is again calling for interested Australians to register their interest or search assignments advertised on their website. There are now a range of different options to choose from including remote, in-country and hybrid assignments.
Today we are happy to bring you a story of a volunteer in the field.
Christopher Coles 01:11
My name is Chris Coles, I'm Australian volunteer working with the Ministry of Health here in Vanuatu, based in Port Vila. And my role is COVID-19 Health Information Systems support officer. So how I came to find out about the Australian Volunteers Program was, I think I've always really known about it for a long time, it's probably some family member around 20 years ago might have mentioned it in passing. And that somehow always stuck in my mind. And it always left me with this impression of perhaps wanting to do this in the future to venture out and experience a different place. I grew up in Canada and Australia. So I haven't really had the chance to travel much abroad. And it was just seemed like a great opportunity to do that. And to also contribute meaningfully, as well through the assignment, I think is just a fantastic programme. So and so I've completed my studies at ANU in science, Bachelor of Science. And so after several years of mostly lab-based work, it felt like it was time to venture out and for a bit of an adventure. And here I am in Vanuatu.
So I've always been quite interested in health and science more broadly, as I mentioned, as having studied and worked in the sort of science fields, laboratories for 10 years prior to coming to Vanuatu. And although the work I did in Australia, prior to this assignment was not really focused on health per se, I definitely feel that I was able to bring to the table my some of my systems-based thinking and sort of problem-solving skills, and apply them to the context of health, specifically in health information and digital health. Having previously worked with the Ministry of Health as well, prior to this assignment, as well as other NGOs in Vanuatu, that was another huge plus that I was able to bring into this assignment and really allowed me to like hit the ground running. Because I knew about the language, the context, the challenges that are specific to a country like Vanuatu. So I was I came prepared.
This assignment, I started in January 2022. But prior to that, I did a year assignment also with the Ministry of Health but in the surveillance unit of the Public Health Department. I'm currently now in the Health Information Systems, which is the corporate services side of the Ministry of Health. So I've been with the Ministry health now for two and a half years. So it's been quite a journey.
When I first started my assignment yeah, in January of 2022. My primary objective was to support the development and implementation of a case management and contact tracing system for COVID cases. Up to that point, Vanuatu had managed to be among the last few countries to remain COVID free. But it was becoming clear with Omicron that COVID was inevitable, and it was just a matter of time. So the Ministry of Health really had to come up with a solution for that. And so they opted for an open-source system backed by the WHO to help with the management of cases as well as some contact tracing. And part of my role was to make sure that this system was configured to meet the needs of the Ministry, and also to support users on how to use it on a day to day basis. And two months after I started the assignment, we had our first COVID case detected outside of quarantine. And at that point, we were almost ready to launch the system. So it wasn't actually fully properly configured. So it was a really like a race against the clock to make sure that the system was deployed, it was functioning well, the users knew what they were doing as cases were increasing, so it was we were likely able to just get it in the nick of time, before things spiralled out of control. And I think it was genuinely quite a success to be able to implement that.
And what's I think the most rewarding part of my assignment is to see now that this system is being used to manage cases of other communicable diseases, such as yaws, which we're trying to eradicate, there's a big push to eradicate yaws in Vanuatu, and this system is being used to, to manage cases of yaws and do contact tracing. So that's a really rewarding feeling. Aside from that, my assignments mostly focused on the implementation of an electronic immunisation registry for the COVID-19 vaccine recipients. So this sort of dates back to my prior assignment. But as part of this assignment, we were able to build on from the work we had done to launch a digitally encrypted immunisation certificate that people of Vanuatu can issue themselves using their phone. So this was the first time in Vanuatu, that a sort of patient level electronic health record was made available to people. So that was another a big win for us, I think. And besides these two things, I think, broadly, my role has also centered around building capacity for the staff of the Ministry of Health on being able to maintain the various systems in use, I've already mentioned two of them. And how can they develop, continue to develop, and continue to maintain these systems without necessarily relying too much on people outside. I think digital health is quite a nascent field, it's a new field in Vanuatu. As great as these technologies are, they can get quite complex and to maintain these complex system requires quite a sort of significant level of technical skills. So I've tried to, to impart and to document the processes required to maintain and develop these systems that we've introduced.
A memorable event that comes to mind was the third Vanuatu Health Research Symposium that took place late last year. And this event brought together health researchers from around Vanuatu, as well as other Melanesian countries like the Solomon Islands and PNG. And it was a great opportunity to showcase the power of health information. I had the privilege to assist some of my colleagues present some novel research from data collected by the Ministry of Health using the systems we developed. I think health information sometimes get a bad rap as being a bit of a chore for people to do. And they don't really see the outcomes necessarily as readily as they would, by treating a patient, you can treat a patient and they get better. And that like a straightaway, you can see the outcomes of that. But health information, you have to wait a little bit longer to see the fruits of your labour. But I think when we came together during that event, and to be able to showcase that data and to be able to present in these creative and insightful ways, I think that was a really, really rewarding, rewarding time.
I think the greatest challenge has been accepting the reality that sometimes good ideas and hard work just aren't quite enough, especially in resource limited contexts. So I definitely have become a lot more patient and accepting of things that I can't change. And as I mentioned earlier, health information is relatively nascent field in Vanuatu. And in many ways, we're still at the ground floor. And there's still a long way to go before we'll be able to see yeah, reap the fruits of our labours in terms of how these systems can continue to expand their uptake of views and functionalities, and better-informed decision makers and consumers of health care around Vanuatu. I think this is probably something that a lot of volunteers feel is that coming to the end of my assignment, I feel like, I'm worried that I might not necessarily get the sense of closure with a lot of the work that we were able to do during my assignment. And as I mentioned earlier, yet, digital health being such a new thing here is you kind of have to have a bit of faith in the, in the hope that these things will continue and sustain themselves and grow and, and really reach their full potential.
I think that definitely what I learned specifically about Vanuatu, working in Vanuatu is that relationships are everything. And that you can have the biggest brand in the world and be the best at your job, but if you don't want these relationships with the people is just not going to get anywhere, you're not going to get anywhere. So you really have to invest quite a bit into building relationships. And to make friends with people. And yeah, spend some time with them outside of work, and learn to laugh together and things like that. So it's, it's, it's more than just a workplace. Coming from Australia, I've had this idea that you go to work your clocking nine to five, and then you go home, and you just go there to do your work. And that's it. But coming here, I've learned that work can be actually a lot more than that. And that, yeah, just gives meaning to your life. I'd like to continue to work in the Pacific Island countries, whether it's Vanuatu or somewhere else in the development context. I think that's really I found my calling, and I hope to continue beyond this for many years.
Fiona Mulhearn 09:24
Today we've heard from Chris Coles, an Australian volunteer working with the Ministry of Health in Vanuatu. You can find more information about the Australian Volunteers Program in the show notes.
I hope you enjoyed the episode.
I’m Fiona Mulhearn. Join us in another fortnight for the next episode of Contain This.
Contain This is produced by the Indo-Pacific Centre for Health Security. You can follow Australia's Ambassador for Regional Health Security, Dr Stephanie Williams, on Twitter at @AusAmbRHS. You can also find that link in the show notes.