MIT IIH Nicaragua

Second Focus Group by iihlab

Saturday, we had another round of focus groups in Esteli, which a small city about 2 hours north of Managua. It’s home to a nursing school and a major hub of CARE’s health care projects. The reaction to the kits was positive, but there was more stratification among ranks (student nurses, nurses, teacher nurses, med students, doctors, MIT students, MIT wannabe students). Nicaragua like most of Latin America respects rank and age, which can lead to some interesting group dynamics. In such a scenario, a professor of nursing looks at the diagnostic kit, says a 12-syllable word like procalcitonina or gonadotropina coriónica humana and the rest of the classroom kneels in awe. The reality is that they don’t really why the procalcitonina does what it does, so they are not prone to hacking it. The students don’t know any better and some of them seem keen on taking a second look at the problem. We are coming up with ideas on how to level conversation:

• Everyone goes by their first name
• We can get T-shirts for people
• Active re-mixing—people are shy here. It’s easy for a dominant personality to have all the fun for themselves during an exercise
• Separate them by age cohort

Lisa and Anna conducted the drug delivery focus group and they had a different set of experiences that will be covered later.

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