By Rogers Mandu | The importance of building professional networks cannot be over emphasized. As we make connections along the way we need to think of how to maintain these relationships which could come in handy in times of need.

Writing on the subject and quoting Francesca Gino who is a professor at Harvard Business School, Rebecca Knight notes that networks give people access to information ranging from advice to problem-solving assistance, adding that over time, “this information access helps people acquire the knowledge and competencies that are necessary to succeed at work and better handle challenges.”

This thinking was not any different from what was at the back of our minds when -as a team at Makerere University Centre of Excellence for Maternal Newborn and Child Health Research- we deliberated on ways of keeping together MNCH stakeholders especially health workers we have worked with over the last decade.

Context

Against this backdrop and the timely presence of technology in form of new media we decide to create an MNCH WhatsApp group in August 2018. This was after the initiation of a vibrant quality improvement collaborative under the Preterm Birth Initiative study which brought together health workers from five hospitals in South Eastern Uganda (Busoga). We needed to keep this collaboration alive even after the project. We also had a group from lower level health facilities especially level 4 health centres who had been brought together through our Maternal and Newborn Scale -Up project. These health workers form the bulk of the group’s membership who also include specialists from within the region and national level who have worked as their trainers and mentors over time.

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