Through the HEAL Malawi Leadership Program, healthcare workers like Taweni are connected, trained, and mentored to look beyond individual patients and improve the systems delivering care to the country’s most hard-to-reach communities. “Through HEAL, I’ve learned to look beyond individual cases. I think about how systems and teamwork influence the quality of care,” Taweni continues, “With every shift I go with a mindset of asking how we can make services safer, better, and more efficient for all patients.” Taweni is not alone in this, as 88% of fellows report that participating in HEAL has changed their approach to work in healthcare.

Putting these newfound skills to practice, Taweni identified a pattern of high rates of hypothermia in her health centre’s NICU. Instead of treating hypothermia on a case-by-case basis, Taweni looked for the root cause. She discovered babies were becoming cold because cloth nappies, used in place of diapers, soaked through quickly and weren’t being changed often enough. Her health centre could not afford diapers, the more absorbent alternative, so she launched a quality improvement project, an approach she learned through HEAL, to solve the problem. Her solution was simple and scalable: Train staff on timely nappy changes and introduce a checklist to ensure consistency. “After some weeks, we saw some real improvement because the babies’ nappies were being changed on time and the hypothermia really reduced.” In fact, the number of NICU hypothermia cases decreased by 21% in 6 months.