On Needs Finding
One of the main objectives of our trip was to get some experience looking for global health technology needs – needs finding. Needs finding is totally unlike the engineering work we’ve done in classes at Rice, and I’ve learned a lot from trying to find needs here in Brazil. For one, it’s a very fluid process. Engineering needs can come up anywhere and everywhere and there isn’t necessarily an obvious problem-solving style approach to finding the problems themselves.
There are obviously unfruitful needs finding environments. Early in our time at Brazil, we would visit a new place and be toured around. Tours aren’t intended to show you the gritty parts of the processes, so they aren’t a great way to find needs. Similarly, when talking to patients we found that patients would often just shower the hospital with praise. While it’s great that the hospital merits such praise, we needed to find a better approach to find needs.
Ultimately, the advice that our mentor, Dr. Ghosn, gave us before we left has rung the most true. We have found the most applicable engineering needs when we are able to spend a significant amount of time in a setting, get comfortable enough with the medical staff to have fruitful and engaging conversations with them, and observe for long enough to allow for some amount of serendipity.
At first, this process was a bit frustrating. We learn in psychology that humans’ ability to keep themselves in a tense state of attention high alert is limited, certainly not something we could maintain for hours on end. But gradually as the time went on, we transitioned into a more constant state of observation, asking questions to learn more. Those moments when those questions accidentally formed potential engineering needs were really quite amazing.
On Human Factors Issues in Brazil
When shadowing an pharmacist at an HIV clinic, the pharmacist showed us the picture below, a common problem he faced in giving patients medication:
The producers of the medication have been working to standardize the way these bottles are produced, and it has had unexpected consequences on delivery of medication. In this case, for instance, many of the patients who get these medications are illiterate, so without any difference between the bottle aside from the letters, it’s hard to get patients to recognize that they’re being given two different medications, rather than a backup supply of just one. This issue actually makes setting up the pharmacy more difficult as well, as it becomes harder to keep track of the medications even if you are literate, color and shape being the easiest and most direct way to distinguish the medications normally.
On Zika
I thought I’d throw in a tidbit about Zika, as it’s the issue I know my parents were most concerned about when I told them I was heading to Brazil for the summer. Obviously, in the US news, Zika has received a lot of attention, and given its effects on newborns rightly so. However, I’ve found it extremely interesting that since I’ve come to Brazil, I have yet to hear much at all about Zika from the people around me. I’ve seen one Zika poster in a local health clinic on the mobile van trip last week, and that’s about it. Other than that, it’s as if Zika isn’t happening save for on the news. One of our mentors here said that when she went to Rio de Janeiro she did get Zika, but she was practically unaffected by it and it went away quickly. It’s interesting to see the divergence between the media’s perception of the condition and the impact of the condition itself here. Barretos is a small sample to base my perception on, but it does show how widely the perception of Zika can range, from the terrors the media inspires to the relative silence we’ve seen on it here in Barretos.