As a resident on the Primary Care Track, Dr. Helen Jack has continued work she began as a Harvard Medical School student in collaboration with King’s College London. She developed and delivered a five-day workshop on performing systematic reviews for early career mental health researchers from Ethiopia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe as part of larger capacity-building initiative (https://amari-africa.org/).
Interested in the sustainability of this effort, Dr. Jack transformed the curriculum and taught a “Training of Trainers” workshop that would allow local university faculty to repeat the workshop. Dr. Jack and colleagues examined the feasibility and impact of this novel model of teaching investigative skills. Dr. Jack’s students hosted 7 trainings in the eight months after her workshop, instructing 103 trainees in systematic review methods. Eighty-eight percent of trainees at each country’s first workshop felt confident that they received sufficient training to complete a systematic review and their scores on knowledge assessments improved. Dr. Jack estimated the trainer-led workshop cost $240 per participant, a $1240 savings compared to providing the training herself.
Universities in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe integrated Dr. Jack’s workshop into permanent curricula.
“I enjoy thinking creatively about cross-cultural pedagogy for adult learners and how to make tricky research concepts stick!”
Publication
Dr. Jack’s results are published in Global Health Action.
Dr. Jack intends to pursue a research-intensive career and continue her work examining capacity and implementation of mental health services in low-resource settings locally and abroad. SPOTLIGHT on Resident Scholarship This project was supported through the DELTAS Africa Initiative [DEL-15- 01], an independent funding scheme of the African Academy of Sciences' (AAS) Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa (AESA), which was formed by the AAS and AUDA-NEPAD with funding from the Wellcome Trust, DFID and the Gates foundation.
Co-authors include Helen E Jack, Christopher Merritt, Girmay Medhin, Rosemary Musesengwa, Chitsanzo Mafuta, Lorna J. Gibson, Charlotte Hanlon, Katherine Sorsdahl, Dixon Chibanda & Melanie Abas