Provider Training

In the rare communities where rural health facilities exist, the quality and capacity of care available is generally extremely low. A sustainable approach to rural healthcare emphasizes improving both the accessibility of services as well as the quality of those services.

Enhancing Capacity

Provider training is one of the key components of SF's clinic and the Foundation's approach to rural healthcare. Both of our resident doctors, Phuntsok Dongdrup and Sonam Drogha, spend approximately three-months per year studying at teaching hospitals in Beijing, such as Peking University Medical Center and Tsinqhua University Medical Center.

Drs. Dongdrup and Drogha likewise benefit from practical resident-training provided by the volunteer doctors who continue to visit our campus during the busy summer months, when the largely nomadic community is most active and our clinic sees the most patients.

In addition, the installation of a satellite dish in 2006 facilitates year-round distance education and remote medical diagnosis with the same medical training institutions in Beijing. SF has also developed an extensive database of Tibetan and Chinese language health literature that is now remotely accessible at the clinic.

These three ongoing and interrelated approaches to capacity building ensure that the quality of care available is continually improving and expanding.

Extending our Reach

SF's emphasis on provider training does not end with our doctors, though. We are currently finishing a pictographic health-manual for distribution to our community health workers (CHWs). The manual will carefully illustrate topics ranging from prenatal health to birthing to broken bones and will better equip our CHWs to access and respond to health issues in the field. Related to this health-manual, we plan to conduct annual refresher and training sessions with our existing CHWs.

Enter Amara

Based on our positive experiences with these capacity-building programs, SF is working with its sister organization, Amara: The Rural China Health Alliance, and the Chinese government to utilize our existing provider-training system and extend training to several dozen partner-clinics throughout rural China.

For more information on this developing project, please see Amara's website.