Gaps in workforce capacity present a major threat to health security in the Indo-Pacific region. To address this, Australian experts have been working with countries across the region in preventing, detecting and responding to infectious disease threats. Through the Australian Volunteers Program and the Indo-Pacific Centre for Health Security, the Health Security Corps was established to deploy volunteers and build capacity to prepare for and respond to infectious diseases.
Georgia first joined the Tongan Ministry of Health as a health information systems support officer in 2019. Working in partnership with the Beyond Essential Systems, her role focused on supporting the digitisation of health and medical stock records, and the expansion and rollout of mSupply, a system that tracks patient and medical stock data. Georgia’s passion for using technology to drive efficiencies and quality improvements in health care motivated her to return to Tonga in 2020 to assist with the digitisation of COVID-19 vaccination data.
Georgia’s return to Tonga for her second volunteer assignment is seeing her assist the Ministry of Health in using the mSupply system to digitally assign a unique vaccination number to every patient, track the cold chain of vaccines, track vaccine stock levels on a day-today basis, and provide a complete COVID-19 vaccination record for patients. These measures are particularly important in the remote outer islands where resources are limited.
“Part of why I love this role is the constant changes that come with trying to roll out a vaccine.”
– Georgia Lack
This excerpt is part of an article from the Indo-Pacific Centre for Health Security in celebration of International Day of Volunteers 2021. To read the full article, visit the website here.
