Thursday and Friday were devoted to presenting our tenth annual Ilula Minnesota International HealthCare Conference. Starting in 2014, Shoulder to Shoulder has presented the annual conference for our colleagues in Tanzania. All our presenters did a great job and all the healthcare professional teams that attended gave positive feedback and will return to their hospitals with quality improvement ideas to implement based on what they learned. We are in the process of compiling the feedback from the evolutions, but the initial informal feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, both from attendees and presenters.
Our first course was presented in January 2014 with 30 attendees. Based on extremely positive feedback from the initial conference, our partners in Tanzania encouraged us to significantly expand the conference to offer this educational experience to a much larger audience of caregivers. As a result, we expanded the conference to include all 26 Southern Zone Lutheran Hospitals and the program has grown to include 130 healthcare professionals. From each hospital we invite one doctor, one nurse, one pharmacist, and one administrator.
Our conference is based on 5 principles:
1. Lifelong Learning. We believe all professionals should contribute to a culture of learning and continuously learn to improve our practice.
2. Interprofessional teamwork. We include nursing, pharmacy, administrators, and physicians in both the attendance and presentations. We emphasize teamwork throughout the conference. We each bring unique knowledge and skills to share; specifically Tanzanian presenters emphasize tropical medicine and HIV, American presenters emphasize the growing global problem of chronic and non-communicable diseases.
3. Mutual Respect. We emphasize the ability for all our participants to teach and learn from each other, in spite of our differences in practice setting, culture, and socioeconomic situation. We include local leaders in planning the conference and select topics based on feedback from participants. Presentations are delivered by both US and Tanzanian professionals. The program is based on a foundation of a longstanding and ongoing relationship. The second day of the conference was clinical talks delivered entirely by Tanzanian health professionals.
4. Continuous improvement. Learning should drive improvement in practice. This year we devoted the entire first day to learning about quality improvement.
5. Sustainable Impact. We believe that education and improvement are some of the most valuable ways to promote a sustainable positive impact on the health of our partners’ communities.
Our conference is accredited by the Education Department at the Fairview to provide participants with educational credits for participation in this program.
Funding for the course is provided through generous contributions from several foundations and individuals including Global Health Ministries, The Peter J King Family Foundation, and Fairview Health System. All funds raised go entirely to hosting the conference, and support for local Tanzanian staff to attend, including meals, travel and lodging expenses. We want to thank all our donors for their generous support. I would also like to thank fellow Course Directors Dr. Mufwimi Saga and Fr Manfred Mjengwa, Shoulder to Shoulder founders Randy Hurley and Gary Moody, Ken Olson, and all the presenters for all their hard work and critical contributions. Special thanks to Cindy Wilke, Shana Steinbeck, and Judith Kiliani for presenting on quality improvement.
We believe that fostering leaning through the conference principles is one of the important ways we can improve the health of the population in and around Ilula. Overall the conference was a great chance to learn together, build relationships, and plan together to improve healthcare in Tanzania.
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