The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for Communication Programs (CCP) highlighted the PANCAP Knowledge for Health (K4Health) project as a best practice during its “Knowledge Management for Effective Global Health Programs” course in June.
The course was geared primarily toward professionals who work or aspire to work in international or domestic public health and Knowledge Management (KM) and Learning. It was facilitated by Dr Tara Sullivan, Project Director at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Ms Sara Mazursky, Deputy Project Director, Knowledge SUCCESS.
Dr Shanti Singh-Anthony, Coordinator, Knowledge Management and Mr Timothy Austin, Senior Project Officer, Communications, PANCAP Coordinating Unit, were invited to share success stories from the K4Health project.
Dr Singh-Anthony highlighted the project’s successful KM initiatives, including the use of Share Fairs and “peer assist” to foster effective and strategic collaboration between the Region’s National AIDS Programme (NAP) Managers and civil society organisation (CSO) representatives. She also spoke of the PANCAP Treat All Knowledge Suite and Roadmap, which provided the Region with essential information on the World Health Organization’s recommendation that all People Living with HIV (PLHIV) initiate antiretroviral treatment (ART), irrespective of CD4+ count or clinical stage.
Dr Singh-Anthony provided details on the project’s success in sharing best practices through South-South Knowledge Exchanges to Barbados, Dominica Republic and The Bahamas on Treat All, Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and successful HIV testing strategies for key populations.
She shared PANCAP’s experience in applying the HIV knowledge management approaches to address the knowledge needs related to the COVID-19 pandemic and posited that these knowledge management approaches could be applied to other health and development issues.
Mr Austin illustrated how online engagement via the redesigned PANCAP website and social media platforms effectively established PANCAP as the knowledge hub for HIV in the Region with over 10 000 website users per month. He elaborated on the PANCAP Integrated Marketing and Communications (IMC) Strategy, which was utilised to elevate PANCAP’s visibility in the Region and effectively share updates on the Region’s HIV response with stakeholders, including CSOs, National AIDS Programmes, youth, policymakers, etc.
Mr Austin emphasised the importance of synthesising information to effectively communicate on complex public health topics using animated videos, infographics, podcasts and other KM and media products.
Dr Sullivan hailed the project as a best practice for effective use of KM for building collaboration and fostering knowledge sharing among distinct groups of people. She spoke of the value of the project in establishing common ground among NAP Managers and CSOs, which enabled increased cooperation in vital areas of HIV prevention, treatment and care.
The project’s success resulted in KM being a permanent part of the PANCAP Coordinating Unit’s operations and increased use of KM techniques in the Region for capacity building and learning for better health outcomes.
Image: Dr Shanti Singh-Anthony, Coordinator, Knowledge Management, and Mr Timothy Austin, Senior Project Officer, Communications, PANCAP Coordinating Unit