The 1000 Challenge is a global initiative developed by Nursing Now Challenge and The Global Health Network to enable 1000 nurses, midwives, community health workers, and other allied health professionals in low-resource settings to lead research studies that gather evidence to address priority issues in their communities. This is a powerful opportunity for leadership and career development delivered through workplace learning whilst generating vital evidence to improve health outcomes in their communities, and by doing, creating leadership experience.
This challenge is needed because there is vast inequity in where research happens, who leads, and who benefits from the evidence. Too few studies address health issues where accessible and pragmatic solutions could change outcomes in patients. For many reasons healthcare settings to do not have research built into their operations and system and so their healthcare professionals are not supported, encouraged, or mandated to undertake research that could practically and effectively reduce the burden of a devasting health challenge – and tackle gaps they see every day. Such research can generate evidence to inform changes in practice, training, or guidance, or healthcare resource allocation, program development, and implementation. The 1000 Challenge system is a mechanism to introduce research into these care settings by taking these workers through the process and guiding every step and element that is needed to deliver good quality evidence that can change practice.
Our solution
Whythawk was contracted to develop the entire stack for thei project. The framework ensured developing support pathways to guide researchers to design and complete a pragmatic and achievable study. The stack consists of a backend database and frontend progressive web application permitting easy pathway development, multilanguage support, and ensuring collaboration and discovery.
The development roadmap delivered the following components:
- Research pathways guide, including structured questionnaires with associated help resources,
- Response management for evaluating responses to research pathways,
- User moderation,
- Reports dashboard for review and including in project evaluations,
- News / blog / Knowledge-base support.
The first release supported multiple languages both statically (in the app) and dynamically (in the database). In essence this meant the people could collaborate on the same research pathway in any language and the system would adapt and ensure that different languages were served appropriately without losing continuity or data integrity.
Outcomes
We delivered the platform to TGHN for launch in 2024 and the project is continuing.
