My background is in public health and I love sharing about places of health that include hospitals, schools and health training institutions to be exact because they are key in the promotion of health of an individual or a community at large. I believe that if people have health needs or in a state of a health emergency that needs visiting a health center or institution, it becomes a lot easier for them to find the place when it is well placed on the map. The same applies when you have to visit a school library to conduct a research or get some references.
Very little was previously known about the various health training institutions before the coming of Google in Uganda and it has been of recent that people have been able to easily navigate their way to various locations and also estimate distance even before a journey is started.
The Ministry in partnership with the IntraHealth International managed Strengthening Human Resources for Health (SHRH) Project have been supporting the Health Training Institutions (HTIs) with teaching and learning materials to effectively implement the reviewed competence-based curricula which aims at improving learning outcomes and the quality of the trainees/Graduates. One of the areas of focus has been providing HTIs with e-books to improve their libraries.
I have been involved in supporting and strengthening human resources for health. We have been installing e-libraries in the various health training institutions with focus on those located in hard to reach areas.
I was tasked to support the efforts of a centralized library and mapping of the prospective benefiting schools where they are trying to connect the various health training institutions with e-libraries.I was tasked to develop a map of the health training schools in Uganda and we successfully made it after i confirmed the coordinates of the different locations.
We have been training staff of different schools about the use of e-library and many have been grateful.
My team was tasked to share coordinates of the various health training institutions so that they estimate the costs of connecting these health training institutions onto the national fibre backbone infrastructure. I was humbled and happy to share with them my experience as a google mapper and we placed them missing schools on map and picked the coordinates of the schools off the map with the help of my experience. It was with the same map that the team was able to draw a GIS map of the health training institutions in Uganda.
I am still mapping and ensuring that more information about the institutions is added to the google maps.