University of Melbourne: Interviewing & Video Documentary Work

As the Communications Manager at the University of Melbourne for the Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative — much of my job was to utilize my video journalism skills to document the work of the initiative.

The initiative aimed to accurately count the births, deaths, and correct the causes of death in low to middle-income countries, which is crucial information for the development of public health planning and policies.

I singlehandedly created videos from end-to-end in the field with visits and interviews with top health, statistics, and civil registration bureaucrats in Brazil, Colombia, Ghana, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Tanzania.

The videos were used on the initiative’s website, the e-newsletter, and the Twitter account, all of which I developed and managed. The purpose of the videos was to show the impact of the work for the funders at Bloomberg Philanthropies, the government stakeholders that supported our work in their countries, the University of Melbourne’s stakeholders, and the public that was interested in the work of the initiative.

Video above features Joyce Djama Ampini-Tetteh, Chief Registration Officer from the 37 Military Hospital Registry in Accra, Ghana describing the process of death registration in hospitals.

Video above features a pioneer of the “verbal autopsy” method for determining the underlying cause of death in people who die outside of health settings, Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne and Technical Advisor for the Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative, Dr. Ian Riley, describes how the method has evolved from his work in the 1970s examining the efficacy of the pneumococcal vaccine in Papua New Guinea into large-scale implementation to improve civil registration and vital statistics in Bangladesh, China, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands.