Education for Health · 2001 · 51 citations · 0 references
MusicFamily MedicineHumanity And MedicineBringing Health MessagesEducationHealth CommunicationSustainable QualitiesMedical AnthropologyHealth EducationTraditional MedicineCultural PracticeCommunity EngagementOral PoetryHealth PromotionHealth MessagesCommunity HealthPublic Health CommunicationNursingCulturePatient EducationRich Oral TraditionEthnographyAnthropologyHealth Profession TrainingArtsCultural Anthropology
In remote eastern Uganda, villages lacking formal health services rely on traditional birth attendants and mothers to address serious health issues through songs and stories, leveraging the community’s rich oral tradition to transmit and reinforce health messages in line with primary health care principles. The study proposes that employing songs and storytelling—time‑honored oral traditions—provides culturally appropriate, credible, affordable, and accessible health communication to serve the poor majority and improve training, program design, and advocacy. The authors leveraged the village’s oral tradition as the primary vehicle for transmitting health messages and supporting their implementation throughout the community.
In villages without doctors and hospitals in the remote eastern Ugandan district of Pallisa, traditional birth attendants and mothers are solving the most serious health problems through the teaching power of songs and stories. The village's rich oral tradition was enlisted as the principal means not only for transmitting these important health messages, but also for supporting their practice throughout the community. Utilizing existing community traditions such as songs and storytelling offers culturally appropriate ways of enhancing the communications component of the health care system to make it serve the poor majority in a readily comprehensible, credible, affordable, and accessible form. These non-formal active-learning methods are highly compatible with and promotive of the general principles of primary health care, especially for their empowering, participatory and sustainable qualities. It is only a natural extension for health educators to more fully employ the use of the time-honored oral traditions of songs and storytelling as a vehicle for communicating health messages. For students in the health professions, awareness of these proven principles for engaging people at the local levels will contribute to more effective training, strategic program design, and advocacy.