Giving Compass' Take:

• Doctors Without Borders (MSF) employee Kate Hughes is stationed at the Sokoto Children's Hospital in Nigeria, learning how to treat patients with Noma disease. She figured out that storytelling practices from the local community are the best way to understand more about the disease and help spread awareness to others. 

• Why is storytelling an effective means of learning about the health of a culture of people?

• Read about how other MSF employees use community engagement tactics to promote healthier practices. 

In Sokoto Children’s hospital in northwest Nigeria, MSF is working alongside the Nigerian Ministry of Health to provide specialist treatment and reconstructive surgery for patients with noma, a disfiguring and often deadly infection which mainly affects young children. Ulcers develop in the mouth and as the disease spreads, these ulcers become gangrenous and destroy the bones and tissue of the face.

If left untreated, noma is fatal in 90% of cases.

Although medical treatment and psycho-social support are vital to patients who have contracted the disease, they are not the only aspects of the MSF project in Sokoto. Raising awareness of the disease, including simple steps that can help prevent it, and the importance of swift medical care for anyone who contracts it, are also key to reducing the suffering noma causes, so the project also includes outreach and health education / promotion.

We all tell stories. For a health promoter, they can be an important communication tool because they follow the natural patterns of social interaction in a community and can spread quickly among people.

Developing joint stories between MSF health teams and local communities about health-related topics allows messages to be spread in a way that fits in with local practices – combining medical knowledge with local knowledge.

These stories were grouped together by theme into a story web, which allowed staff to better understand how people in the community perceive noma. The web covered everything from perceptions about where noma comes from to how it can be treated.

Read the full article about promoting health through storytelling by Kate Hughes at Doctors Without Borders.