Your Feedback has Profound Value

Your Feedback has Profound Value

We eat, sleep, and breathe UVP. We know what programs look like on the ground and the names of all the VHTs. We see the same faces when we go to the village and we have relationships with staff members at all the local health centers and the Iganga District offices. We’re embracing UVP all the time, so there are things we take for granted, things we intrinsically know because of our intimacy with the work. It’s called the curse of knowledge – once you learn something, it’s hard to remember how it feels to not know.

The survey that many of you took last month helped to illuminate ways we could talk out the work of UVP, the work you support, to promote better understanding of what exactly is going on in villages in Iganga. Here’s a couple tidbits we received from you.

Yes, you got all the questions right! If you ticked the box indicating that trachoma education is one of UVP’s programs, that tells us that we need to do a better job at highlighting program changes (we used to implement trachoma awareness programming, but began focusing on our other programs in 2009).

Most respondents to the survey know that UVP provides education in clean water (83%) and sanitation & hygiene (77%) and clean water access (75%). What surprised us is that most people don’t know that, in addition to malaria education, we provide malaria testing and treatment (only 35% knew this). And while many people (68%) know UVP provides HIV education, less than half (47%) know that HIV testing and counseling coincide with that education.

We learned that the term ‘public health’ is ambiguous and broad – it can mean many different things to many different people. The largest majority of people categorized it as required, useful, or necessary (23%), followed by a community concern (17%), and finally as general health or non-descript health terms (15%). We could do a better job at painting a picture of what public health means, particularly in rural Ugandan villages.

We also learned that it is difficult to determine what UVP is directly responsible for due to our close ties with other organizations. So, our job is to better communicate those things to you! While we’re making adjustments in our communication, feel free to reach out to us if there is something that you really like, something you learned, or even something that left a bad taste in your mouth (something you didn’t like). Please be gentle, we really do take your comments to heart!

And finally, a heartfelt thank you! Because you took the time to provide us with your input, we can provide better education about what public health looks like and the real impacts it has to rural communities in Iganga.

Hugs,

Kelly Child

Executive Director