Summary of the Training Coordinators’ Workshop (1/5/02)

For Harborview’s Health Information Project

By Christine Wilson Owens, Project Coordinator

Twenty-five people attended the workshop held at the UW Health Sciences Library teaching lab, including three of Harborview’s cultural caseworkers; one Somali medical interpreter; four health sciences librarians; nine library information school students; members of the Somali, Cambodian and Ethiopian communities; two community technology lab coordinators; and other Harborview staff, including the project coordinator and previously-signed-up volunteer training coordinators.

The workshop began about 20 minutes late, due to difficulties with parking and finding the location.  Signing the sign-in sheet, collecting the training materials and curriculum

handouts, getting nametags, and mingling occupied folks until the meeting began at 12:20pm.

To begin the meeting Christine, the project coordinator, gave a brief introduction of the project and the NLM program that funds the project.  She introduced herself with a short description of her education in anthropology and work history.  Next, Ellen Howard and Nancy Press, the Health Sciences Librarians who developed the curriculum, introduced themselves and described their own backgrounds and work with the curriculum material and similar projects.  Then, all present introduced themselves to the group, giving their names and background on how or why they came to be at the workshop, and what they thought they could bring to the table.  The room was full of experience, interest and variety.  Community leaders, health promoters, trainers, librarians and library students, technology instructors all in one room for a Saturday introductory workshop made for a solid basis to begin the training program work.

After introductions, the main body of the day’s agenda began: learning the training curriculum.  Nancy and Ellen teamed up to talk about finding health information and demonstrated the process online on a large screen, while people paired up and followed along at their own desktop computers.  The project’s homepage http://depts.washington.edu/ethnomed/HMCproject/HMCtrainer.html was the starting place where the curriculum template and community pages are found. 

The learning process was truly interactive, with questions and comments welcome from everyone.  The two librarians walked through 10 objectives, including where to start looking for information, how to judge the quality of information, and how to state questions so as to find the information that is needed.  Ellen discussed examples of culture and language related to health and the search for health information.  Halfway through the curriculum, the group took a break.  Snacks and beverages were provided by Nancy, Christine, Ellen, and Ellen’s husband, a German pastry chef!

People had a chance to walk through the objectives on their own, or with partners at their computer stations, looking for answers to their own health questions.  Medline Plus was a favorite starting place, EthnoMed garnered some constructive criticism, and people saw an example of a multi-lingual, interactive tutorial about Diabetes. 

After the curriculum training, Emily Bancroft a representative of the City of Seattle Department of Information Technology (a project partner along with Harborview, UW Health Sciences and the communities) showed the group a city website cityofseattle.net/tech for information about finding public access computers.  Next, Christine outlined the roles and responsibilities of the volunteer training coordinators and community trainers/health education advocates, the process of recruiting the trainers/advocates and the tentative time schedule for the volunteers to follow.  Questions and discussion helped to clarify the next steps for participants, the responsibilities and roles.  Suggestions for the project coordinator included sending out schedule reminders to the volunteers.  Everyone agreed that getting the whole group of volunteer coordinators and trainers together in a month or so was a good idea.  Asfaha Lemlem, Lab Coordinator at Yesler Terrace, offered to have that gathering at Yesler Terrace.  The group agreed that was a good place.  Scheduling for that meeting would be coordinated with Asfaha and happen after trainers are recruited.

People then volunteered to work as training coordinators, resulting in all the communities being covered for training with at least one volunteer per community.  Three of the seven communities have a pair of coordinators who will be working with community members.

One person volunteered to take the training curriculum back to a community college/ESL class setting that is additional to the participating community organizations and labs that serve the seven communities.

People were invited to evaluate the day’s workshop on the back of their agenda pages.  Only two people did that, perhaps because there had already been much discussion or because the time was getting late.  One of the respondents described the project as exciting and suggested that the project coordinator clarify the schedule and responsibilities.  The other person commented that Medlineplus was an especially good place to go for health information and that he was glad to have learned about it.

Christine committed to distributing the description, recommendation and application materials for recruiting community trainers/advocates early the following week so that volunteers could begin the training soon.

Lots of talking and networking continued after the workshop was officially over.

     Names of attendees at the Training Coordinators’ Workshop: Mary Neuman, Loree Hyde, Valerie Wonder, Lorie Vik, Kim Lundgreen, Mike Pruzan, Niels Bartles, Salah Dodi, Tsegaye Gebru, Yun Kem, Grace Ko, Afaha Lemlem, Ali Omar Abdi, Abdullah Ahmed Fido, Ali Mohammed, Amy Fields, Hassan Osman, Jennifer Huong, Khadija Kundiye, Paula Munoz, Catherine Burroughs, Emily Bancroft, Christine Wilson Owens, Nancy Press, Ellen Howard