Since pilot operations in 2003, The Mindset Health Channel, a partnership between Mindset Network, the National Department of Health and Sentech, provides a multimedia platform, to deliver uplifting health education and promotion on critical health issues, including tuberculosis the HIV and AIDS pandemic, on a mass scale.
The channel, which began broadcasting TV programmes in October 2003, has advanced to Internet datacasting reaching an increasing number of clinics and hospitals. From 48 sites in the pilot phase, Mindset Health now has 298 established sites throughout South Africa.
The satellite uplink provided by Sentech allows datacasting directly to users with information in video, multimedia and print available on demand.
"When patients gather in a clinic they can watch a TV programme in the waiting area, while a healthcare worker independently explores in-depth clinical management material on a PC," says Tricia Hobson, Marketing Manager, Mindset Network. This can be interrupted and returned to at a time convenient for the healthcare worker.
The public broadcast, offering 'infotainment' delivers education and promotion on HIV and AIDS (prevention, management, treatment and care), tuberculosis, other major diseases such as maternal and infant health, and the underlying issues such as gender violence, in multiple languages through, drama, public service announcements, documentaries, interviews and discussions.
"Mindset Health sources high-quality content from a number of our media content partners, including SABC, Soul City, Love Life, Khomanani, Community Health Media Trust and Kagiso Educational Trust," says Hobson. The content is available in five languages - English, SeSotho, isiZulu, isiXhosa and Afrikaans.
Healthcare workers and nurses report that the programmes provide an invaluable resource of up-to-date information which adds enormous value to their counselling and administrative efforts.
The Mindset Health Channel aims to eventually broadcast to 4 000 public healthcare sites, and hospitals as wall as private clinics, prisons and community centres, educating 97 000 nurses and 36 million South Africans.
To do this will require a variety of project and funding partnerships to support the roll-out as well as to sustain usage among both the patients and the healthcare workers in the public health sector.
"We believe these targets are quite within reach and the satellite technology supporting the Mindset Health Channel has the capacity to deliver quality content to South Africa and beyond," says Pranill Ramchander, Sentech's Portfolio Manager: Corporate Communications.
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Sentech is a leading broadcast distribution and telecommunications company. As a fully commercial, state-owned enterprise, Sentech provides signal distribution, broadband multimedia services, value-added services and is a carrier-of-carrier for international voice traffic.
Mindset Network
Mindset Network is a South African based non-profit organisation that was founded in 2002. It develops and distributes quality and contextually relevant educational resources for use in the schooling, health and vocational sectors. Materials are distributed through various technology platforms including broadcast and datacast. The materials are made available in video, print and in computer-based multimedia formats.
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