Community &COVID-19 &Infection Prevention &Innovation &Zoonoses Bill Brieger | 10 Sep 2020 06:34 am
Innovate4AMR emphasizes social innovations in resource-limited settings
From Innovate4AMR Team: We are reaching out about Innovate4Health, a global design sprint for student teams to design innovative solutions to address emerging infectious diseases. This collaborative design sprint grows out of our past two years’ worth of work organizing Innovate4AMR. With COVID-19, we have broadened the scope from drug-resistant infections to tackling urgent challenges and health inequities of emerging infectious diseases. Organized by the ReAct—Action on Antibiotic Resistance, the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations (IFMSA), and the IDEA (Innovation + Design Enabling Access) Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Innovate4Health offers student teams the opportunity to join the front lines of the fight against antimicrobial resistance and COVID-19.
This year, student teams are encouraged to innovate around one of three pillars: 1) Ensuring effective prevention and treatment of emerging infectious diseases in the hospital setting; 2) Preventing zoonotic disease transmission in food systems; and 3) Making community health systems more resilient to emerging infectious diseases. We hope that you might pass this along to faculty colleagues at universities and share this opportunity with potentially interested students.Taking a systems approach, Innovate4Health emphasizes social innovations that consider the needs of resource-limited settings. We are looking for student teams (2-4 students per team) with ideas for innovative solutions. Through the design sprint, teams will work through ideation, implementation, and advocacy strategies to support the adoption of these approaches. The selected teams will work with a team of experts to co-construct their solutions through both recorded and live learning sessions. We invite applications from teams that would be excited to collaborate with other highly talented student teams.
The design sprint will extend over three to four months. We will explore the local context of resource-limited settings through guided tours through virtual healthscapes, from a wet market to a secondary hospital.
Students do not need any previous experience on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) or other emerging infectious diseases. In the competitive application process, we are looking for student teams providing a vision for what they might want to innovate, including the specific problem and context, as well as sharing how they might be positioned to help implement such a project.
At the application stage, however, we do not expect fully developed projects. The design sprint process is intended to help teams develop further their ideas from the application stage. Innocate4AMR have outlined additional information on Innovate4Health on our website. There, you will also find more background information on Innovate4Health, as well as the design sprint timeline, Terms and Conditions, and submission guidelines. Last year, 163 student teams answered our call for Innovate4AMR applications, and ten finalist teams were selected.
The deadline for team applications is Sunday, October 18, 2020. Those selected to participate in the design sprint will go through developing stages of idea refinement, implementation planning, and advocacy planning, after which the best teams will have the opportunity to present to an international panel. We will be releasing additional resources to support teams in developing applications, and interested students can sign up for updates here.
Innovate4AMR would appreciate your help in spreading the word about Innovate4Health. If you or your students have further questions, please write our team at innovate4amr@gmail.com.