July 8, 2019

Part of our mission here at the Bhutan Foundation is to help build capacity for health-care providers across the country. With that in mind, we recently partnered with the Yale School of Public Health to support an advanced data analysis training in Paro!

This five-day workshop saw a total of 20 participants from the Ministry of Health, Royal Government of Bhutan, Faculty of Traditional Medicine, Medical Education Centre for Research, Innovation and Training, Faculty of Nursing and Public Health, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck National Referral Hospital, and the Bhutan Kidney Foundation. While there, representatives from these groups worked to develop competency related to data entry, improved their understanding of statistical concepts in data analysis, and enhanced their skills in data interpretation.

Like many of our initiatives, this training was proposed and came into effect based on engaging with people on the ground to discover what tools and capacities they most need in order to succeed. In this case, the feedback came from a few previous research grantees after they expressed the need for credentials in data analysis and interpretation -two skills which together form a vital element in any type of research study.

We want to give a special thanks to the Yale School of Public Health and the volunteer facilitator who covered topics such as: how to transfer data into SPSS software, central tendency and dispersion, and analysis of variance. We look forward to working with the Yale School of Public Health in the future on even more endeavors to build capacity for our health-care teams here in Bhutan!