The Slide Guide – A Road to Health Booklet Tool.

The Road to Health Booklet (RTHB) is a useful child medical record in the form of a booklet, which captures a child’s health info in the first five years of life. The easy to use Slide Guide tool helps healthcare workers correctly interpret growth chart data in the RTHB. It also sparks constructive conversations between healthcare workers and parents or caregivers on how best to support their child’s healthy development.

The Problem.

Growth charts in the RTHB for infants and toddlers are used by healthcare workers to monitor the growth of a child and to intervene if necessary. Growth is monitored by plotting key measurements (such as baby’s height, weight and head circumference) on a chart and comparing changes over time with accepted ‘norms’. Growth faltering is often the first sign of a serious health issue and these charts are important tools for supporting healthy development. While research shows the significant health and developmental benefits of using growth monitoring charts, they are underutilised and often poorly interpreted by healthcare workers in South Africa.

The Innovation.

The Slide Guide is a simple non-tech device that helps healthcare workers accurately interpret a child’s growth trend on the RTHB’s growth chart. It also contains prompts and messages that help the healthcare worker to discuss the growth trend with the caregiver in a way that makes sense to them and is encouraging. This tool is innovative in that it drives behaviour change and is cost effective and scalable in the most resource-constrained settings. The look and feel of the Slide Guide has been developed to match the RTHB and has had extensive input from health care professionals.

Why we invested.

We are excited to be part of the development of an innovative tool that improves how growth data is captured and interpreted and, equally importantly, enhances the way in which healthcare workers engage with parents through constructive dialogue. Having meaningful conversations enables healthcare workers to establish rapport and learn more about the child and parent’s context, allowing for preventative intervention to take place when necessary.