Volunteer Position: Child Skin Care Doctor / Nurse

CONTACT DETAILS

Name of institution:    Research and Training Centre for Community Development

Key contact name       Ms Tran Thi Thu Ha – Deputy Director  / Host coordinator

Key contact tel. number (direct)        +84 24.3628.0350

Key contact tel. number (other)         +84 912 552 393

Email Address:                                      ha.tran@rtccd.org.vn      Hatran2004@gmail.com;

Address                                                   No 39, lane 255, Vong st, Dong Tam,

County/State/Province/Region        Hai Ba Trung dist, Ha Noi

Country                                                   Vietnam

OVERVIEW

The Research and Training Centre for Community Development (RTCCD), established in 1998, is a local non-government organization. Since 2005, RTCCD become a think tank that conducts policy oriented research on health and provides an independent voice for advocating participatory community development in Vietnam.

Among the local NGOs in Vietnam, RTCCD is known as the leading organization in health policy-oriented research and innovative community-based intervention in the fields of community based mental health, early childhood development, non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and social work. Its research and interventions are then documented and converted into policy brief for advocacy to amend national policies and guidelines and transformed into guidelines for other NGOs to scaling-up.

RTCCD currently is the chair organization of the NCD-Vn group, Evidence-based Health Policy Development. It manages a community Facebook group “Y te vi dan” (Health for People) where updated information on health promotion and education is posted.   It also manages a Facebook community group on Learning Club on the first 1000 days to provide information to parents on pregnancy and early childhood care and development.

RTCCD operates one research/project office and one clinic – the Green Pine Clinic (GPC). It is the day-time counseling and assessment for early childhood development.

RTCCD has 28 full-time staff working at the project office (17 staff) and the clinic (11 staff). All 17 staff at the research-project office has good English skills. Doctors and psychologists at the clinic could speak both English and French. The organization always provides a team-work environment for volunteers, has a dynamic and friendly working environment and they are keen to learn and make changes.

Their website: http://www.rtccd.org.vn.

Program description:

You are going to support the project “Learning Clubs on the first 1000 days”.

Learning Clubs are a novel, evidence-informed, structured intervention addressing the major risks to early childhood health and development in the first 1000 days of life (pregnancy and until child 2 years old). In a joint project RTCCD Vietnam, Monash University, the University of Melbourne and the Burnet Institute in Australia, with the support of Vietnam’s Ministry of Health, developed Learning Clubs and are running a trial to evaluate the impact of this approach in a rural province in Vietnam. This innovation was developed from the evidence generated by the collaboration over the past 15 years about the psychological and general health of women during pregnancy and after giving birth, and the health and development of their young children.

The Learning Clubs intervention comprises 20 educational sessions, one a home visit and the others, facilitated group meetings. All content is drawn from interventions shown in randomized control trials in resource-constrained settings to be effective in addressing maternal nutrition, mental health, parenting capabilities, infant health and development, or gender-based violence and empowerment. Sessions are organized into five modules targeting perinatal stage-specific essential knowledge and skills. The educational package includes 3 family books, 5 facilitator handbooks, 50 video clips and 20 take-home-message posters. The project materials were developed by contracted with a media company (VTV) to design the books and to shot video clips. Men are invited to participate in sessions and facilitators are trained to include them in the learning activities and question and answer discussions. The importance to optimizing women’s health and infant health and development of men’s care is emphasized and the harms of family violence outlined.

So far, we have developed about 15 video on pregnancy care and children 0-6 months care. During the learning club sessions with families and newborns children, we received a lot of questions about child skin problem after delivery and diaper problems. We need support to develop short video clips (2-5 mintues/each) to give answer to family about child skin problem and how to care for that and how to prevent that in the future. We need supports from doctor or nurse who have profound experience and background in skin care, or dermatology.

LOCATION

RTCCD is located in a 7-storey building. It is about 7 km away from the Hanoi central business district.

KEY FACT

In 2018, the organization has conducted the following activities:

• 7 research and projects
• 10 workshops with 998 participants
• 21 training course with 1083 attendants

Working hours: 8.00 – 17.00 Monday – Friday

28 full-time staff

PROGRAM MISSION

The program aims to educate parents of appropriate skin care for newborn and young children and to prevent serious health problems, following the skin issues.

PROGRAM GOALS AND TASK LISTS

Develop video clips on child skin care to educate parents with newborn children

• Identify topics of child skin care for video development
• Develop transcript for each topic
• Film the topics with professional media team

Educate families of child skin care

• Speak at a workshop with about 50 – 80 mothers and pregnant women about child skin issues and how to care for that. We can use the video clip to support the talk and the volunteer will engage most of the time with questions and answers

YOUR ROLES

• Discuss with project team and invited doctor of the child skin care issue and the team come up with list of issue to develop the video clip
• Develop the transcripts: steps of behavior to instruct the family, explanation of the child issue, finding image/video clip to illustrate the skin problems. We have doll for demonstration if you need.
• Act as instructor in the video clip. You will instruct the studio. The media team will film you and they will develop those footages into video clips. You will be sent the video clip to review the content, making sure the clips reflect correctly what we want to say.
• Speak at a workshop with parents in Hanoi about child skin care. A local doctor will go with you to support and exchange knowledge during the talk.

TYPICAL DAYS

• The office operates from 8.00 – 17.00 from Monday – Friday. The volunteer can work from 9:00 am to 16:00 pm to avoid the traffic jams.
• The volunteer will work with the local team includes 1 project coordinator and 1 project officer and the doctor to have full understand about the project and expectation of further video clip to develop.
• The volunteer will have the free lunch with staff (the organization has a very good cook with diversified local food) from 12.00 – 13.30. It is the time where cultural values can be exchanged. If you like drinking water during meal, feel free to bring the water with you to the lunch room.
• From 13.30 – 14.00 the volunteer can join the Mindfulness session (sitting on Himalaya salt stone and practice meditation) or sometimes can go out with young staff for coffee.
• The local staff sometimes have outdoor activities and they often invite volunteer to join with them. It is a dynamic and friendly working environment.

The volunteer is encouraged to have the weekend off to explore Hanoi and Vietnam.

DRESS CODE

Dress as your wish. It is a friendly working environment

PROJECT STRUCTURE

One the first day, there will be the welcome meeting which the project coordinator and the project officer will meet you, give you overview of project and show you the materials. A work plan will be finalized with detailed activities.

From the next days, you and the team will work closely. You will be in the same working room with the project team to enable discussions. When necessary the project team will invite a pediatrician to join the discussion to finalize the content for the video clip. Then the project team will invite the media team to film your instruction.

Once we agree on content for the workshop and the preparation is completed, RTCCD will start the dissemination to invite about 50-80 parents to come and learn about knowledge that you share.

OTHER ACTIVITIES

We might ask for your support in finding resources for further child care issues. For example: probiotic use, soothing baby crying; terrible crying before going to bed.