Simon Birk Transcript

Simon [00:00:01]:  Who wants to work with someone that’s not listening to them? So, I think if you want it to succeed, listen to the people who know the most. Health in Your Hands is a non-profit I co-founded alongside 6 of my peers in 2025. And you just adapt, and you improvise to the best of your ability, and you find people who are able to get your work across the line.

Marta [00:00:22]:  Today on Survey and Beyond, we are joined by Simon Birk, cofounder of Health in Your Hands. He’s here to show us how data collection, environmental monitoring, and local collaboration can come together to strengthen public health in communities around the world. Welcome to Survey and Beyond, Simon.

Simon [00:00:44]:  Hello. Thank you for having me.

Marta [00:00:45]:  Hello. Well, I would like to kick off our conversation today with a question I usually ask all our interviewees. So, usually, we’d like you to share a bit about your journey. In this case, your journey into healthcare and what first drew you into this sector.

Simon [00:01:06]:  I think that’s a question with a very long answer, but I think the short of it is that I think I was originally drawn to healthcare and medicine in general. And for background, I’m a fourth-year med student right now at McGovern Medical School, finishing up my MD this coming year. And I don’t know, I think medicine is just a wonderful blend of applied science and humanity. And I’ve always been someone who’s loved the science of exciting things, but the training you get in medicine to be able to connect with people in a very wide variety of contexts, I think, is very valuable. I love going into the hospital each day, so that’s I think what draws me to medicine is the people more than anything. You can scratch the itch of science in a lot of places in a lot of ways, and I’ve managed to do that through programs that I’ve gotten involved with while I’ve been in medical school, but medicine is special. It’s very hard, but that’s how I got here.

Marta [00:02:01]:  It’s a great answer. And your career has expanded beyond medical school, so you are currently the president and CEO of an organization, Health in Your Hands. So, could you, just for our listeners, just describe the mission of this organization and the work that you do?

Simon [00:02:21]:  So, Health in Your Hands is a non-profit I co-founded alongside 6 of my peers in 2025. And what began as, I would say, like, a collective curiosity about the ways in which diagnostics could help close gaps in persistent global health challenges, I think has become an all-out investigation into the ways that we can use technological advancements that have been made to make tools cheaper, to see if we can investigate that in order to solve these persistent global health issues with accessible, affordable innovation. Cause a lot of these tools exist that we are investigating currently for various things like schistosomiasis and cervical cancer prevention. But what we’re doing is, I think, finding the data and the partners that will make the workflows that we’re looking into something that clinicians will feel comfortable using in the future. And then not only that, finding a place for the workflows that we’re investigating within a global strategy for prevention. And so, we work with partners across the world, mostly in Nigeria for our schistosomiasis project. But the thing that I think makes Health in Your Hands unique is that, from the start, we’ve been very, very focused on ensuring that the local perspective is integrated into anything that any of our programs include and anything that we advocate for, because we understand that we are well trained in science and have a lot of experience in that field. Really, the people who know diseases best that we’re trying to fight are the people that we work with in the places that deal with it daily. So, that’s us. We like to leverage any way to make diagnosis more available, more accessible, and we like to do it with the community at the forefront of that design.

Marta [00:04:23]:  And that’s exactly what I want to discuss with you today, you know, is how do you put the community in that as a central role in your projects. And for that, I would like to focus on one of the major projects you are working on, and as you already mentioned, that is related to schistosomiasis. And actually, the name of the project is SCOPE, which stands for Schistosomiasis Control from the One Health Perspective. And I would like to unpack this title a little bit for our listeners. So, first and foremost, could you explain this disease and why it remains such a major global health challenge?

Simon [00:05:08]:  So, that’s a great question. Schistosomiasis outside of the most endemic areas, especially in Europe, where I come from, where I live, the United States, is less well known. Schistosomiasis is a parasitic illness that is transmitted through contaminated water. It has a very complex life cycle. On land, it has a host that is us, that’s humans. In the water, it has a host that is the freshwater snail and this actually, if I continue explaining, will wrap back to why we call our project Schistosomiasis Control from a One Health Perspective, and the key is One Health. When a human sheds in a community through their urine, eggs of the schistosoma then get transmitted to the water. That gets taken up in a certain life form by the freshwater snails that are there. And in places with stagnant water and underground vegetation that the snails love to habitate it in, there’s a reservoir for this disease. And later on, the schistosoma matures enough; it leaves the snail and starts shedding. And the snail starts shedding, which then can enter humans again whenever they enter the water or get exposed to the water, and it enters us through our skin. Inside of us, depending on the type. The place where I work, urogenital schistosomiasis is the dominant form. The worms migrate to the vasculature around the bladder, so the blood vessels near the bladder and they can cause UTI-like symptoms. The most common symptom of it would be hematuria, which is blood in the urine, and it can essentially cause a chronic UTI-like presentation that eventually can lead to some things in women, such as a syndrome called female genital schistosomiasis, and downstream can lead to bladder cancer, can potentiate the carcinogenesis of HPV to cause cervical cancer and can cause infertility as well. So, in describing that life cycle, you can see that a lot of human health and communities and places with water that is contaminated with this disease, a lot of the health of that community is determined by the environment in which they live. And so you could treat a person there, and as long as they still rely on the water, which is vital for life. Anywhere we go, we’re going to get reinfection. And so whenever we created this effort, in part of it naturally came together as we listened to our partners in Nigeria and also people in the U.S who’ve been experts on those and have worked on developing schisto control for a long time. We realized that it wasn’t just about creating a diagnostic, and so we really expanded to three pillars. We expanded to a diagnostic to treat people where the disease is, an educational program to teach kids what schistosomiasis is, who may not already know and have formal teaching to try and decrease prevalence through behavior-related changes and just health behaviors, and then the final thing is: is there a way that we can quantify what’s going on in the environment? And is there a way that we could safely and responsibly impact that to decrease burden? And that’s what One Health means. It’s that human health is inextricably linked to the health of the environment. And just those really, like, one of the ideal examples of why that’s true.

Marta [00:08:37]:  Wonderful. That would be my next question. What does One Health mean? So, thank you. And now I really want to dig into those three pillars that you mentioned. Before, I just want us to understand where are we at in this project. I mean, I imagine that this is still ongoing. So, could you just give us a picture of what happened so far and what’s going to happen in the future?

Simon [00:09:01]:  Yeah. Of course. So, last year, we developed a workflow for diagnosis of schistosomiasis, and we developed sort of like a toolkit of things that we think, used together, could be an effective multi-legged strategy to try and combat schisto in an area with a multi-dimensional approach. Last year, we created our workflow for the diagnostic, which is a reusable filtration kit. It’s essentially stainless steel mesh with little, small pull-up cords sandwiched between two pieces of plastic to create a cart that can fit inside a $2 microscope called the Foldscope. And we put this in the hands of people who hadn’t ever used a microscope before and found that it was relatively easy to pick up as long as they got a good amount of structured training surrounding it. So, we flew to Nigeria, and with the help of our local partners at FUNAAB as well as the Federal Medical Center of Abeokuta and some of the friends in the NTD office of the Ministry of Health for Ogun State, we created an 8-day, 5-community pilot study that went out into the communities and looked at it. So, in these communities, these rural communities in Nigeria, there is a healthcare role called the community health worker, and the community health worker is a very integral part of the NTD approach because it extends the healthcare system beyond the traditional hospital and clinic infrastructure. These are people in the community trusted by the community to specifically do healthcare tasks. And so we wanted to see: is there a way that we can put this directly in their hands and see if it’s effective? And so we did over the course of 8 days in 5 communities, and we found that by the end, we were seeing very good sensitivities and specificities, and we believe our overall accuracy in the final community was 92.1, with a good positive trend over the entire study. So, we got very promising results. In addition to that, we had our ecological team, with the help of Dr Ekpo and some people on our team, as Thomas Copeland came to help with flying drones over the reservoir after approval by the communities, and we got imagery of the local riverbank. And then afterwards, we analyzed the imagery and said, “Is there a way that we can see something that cues us into how much disease is here?” And fortunately, we had a model to go by. There had been a pilot done by Stanford researchers in Senegal beforehand that used drone imagery to identify emergent and submergent vegetation as a proxy for how much snail habitat is present and therefore how much its disease is present. And they found it was great there, but as far as I’m concerned had not been used in this area of Nigeria. So, we were looking to see, yes, it’s still West Africa, but are some of those ecological things, like the snails that we’re finding, the flora that we’re seeing in these areas, are those comparable species? And then does the general model hold up? And we had good results there as well. And then the educational part: we had Dr Cynthia Umunnakwe, creator of the Schistos and Ladders game, which is an educational game that’s made on the traditional form of the Chutes and Ladders game to teach kids about what schistosomiasis does and how do you protect yourself from it. And we ran it with kids there to good results. Last year, we didn’t get a chance to stratify that as its own part of the research that we were doing. We just did that to get people exposure. But this year, we hope to go back with not just Schistos and Ladders, but also a wide variety of games that we can use to potentially help these kids sort of grow to understand the kinds of things that are present in the environment in which they live. So, that brings me to this year to answer the second part of your question. I woke up chatty today. This year, we hope to go back. Last year, we did a pilot study that does this work, and we wanna build on that by making our work more longitudinal. So, this year, we’re gonna go back. We’re expanding on, we realized, hey, every single day we were there, we saw improvements. And so we thought to ourselves, what if we expanded the formal education that we were giving, and we expanded the length of the trial? Previously, we looked at: does this work on an individual level? We’re comparing the sensitivity and specificity of it. Now, we’re going to say, if we create a strategy that includes these things in a community, does the overall prevalence of that community decrease? And that’s what we’ll be looking for this year. So, when we go next week, we’re gonna start by train and choose, enrolling the people that we’ll be helping over the next 11 months. And we’re gonna be telling them, you know, showing them how to use a Foldscope and then we’re gonna be going to 12 communities. And then at these 12 communities, 12 community health workers, which is what I mean when I say choose, will be learning how to use the Foldscope over several days with supervision while we’re doing our initial prevalence survey. So, regarding these communities, we’re seeing, alright, how much schisto is present right now at month 0? And then we’re teaching over the course of 12 days, 1 day per community. Alright. While we’re doing the gold standard, let’s divert some of the samples for training. And then after this month, we’re going to let these queues go back to the health posts, to the communities that they serve, and then we are going to sort of allow them, or we’re going to essentially allow them, to implement this in their communities with their catchment areas, with their patient populations. And then monthly, have Ministry of Health officers come and check in with them as a part of their normal communication and then track some of the work that they’re doing. How many people are they screening? What are the positives? And then at the end of the 11 months, we’re gonna go back again and then say in the community how many people here have schistosomiasis. Did we see a decrease from last year at the same time? Is there any evidence of a durable benefit? And then, at the end of the whole study, we’re gonna give everyone in all the communities; we’re gonna orchestrate mass drug administration there to make sure that the current strategy, which is going to a community and giving everyone who qualifies Praziquantel. Just because we’re currently testing this doesn’t mean that, in the end, we’re still going to give people what is currently the accepted practice, and we’ll make sure that people get that. So, that’s where we are. In terms of the ecological side of things, our goal for this year is to expand the amount of area that we’ve used with this strategy where with the help of Dr Wood and some of the people at Stanford, Eddie Chamberlain and friends like that, who have worked with our ecological team to improve the processes that we’re using. We’re gonna go back and try and expand the area that we’re using to see if we can derive a benefit from that, but we also want to establish sort of additional drone flights over a period of time to see if there’s temporal change and to see if in different seasons, is the change that we see the seasonality that we see in schistosomiasis infection is also something. Do we see changes in the water as well that correlate with that? That would give us more strength in the numbers that we’re seeing and the use of it as a proxy for snail habitats.

Midroll [00:16:29]:  I’m taking a quick pause from the episode so I can tell you about a great opportunity happening right now for PhD or MD students. We at SurveyCTO run the primary data collection research grant every year, and the application window for this year has just opened and will run until September 30. We provide this grant and do all the work that goes along organizing logistics and reviewing applications because we really want to support those who do the important work that comes from collecting data. This grant is specifically for PhD or MD students. So, if you or a colleague can benefit from this grant, make sure you apply or share. You can get the application link in the show notes. Okay. Back to our conversation.

Marta [00:17:14]: This is a great overview. And now I just want to take a step back because we talked about this idea of highlighting the local perspective. And when you talk, we always hear the community. This is for the community. This is with the community. So, what I would love to really understand is: how did you involve the community at the planning stage of things, and how much did you learn from it? Because we are in a data collection podcast, I’m eager to understand, you know, what kind of data did you collect from the community? How did you collect the data from the community? And how did that impact the whole design of these projects in a way?

Simon [00:17:55]:  That’s a great question. I think that question is the most important question as to why this project has gotten as far as it is. I think it starts before you get to the field. I think it starts with listening to the region’s experts, to the practitioners and physicians that live there, to the people who work in NTD control. The first data collector we is was ourselves, and the phone calls that we made, listening to local experts telling us, if you’d like to do this, you know, well, we asked them, “Does this have value? Where do you see this fitting in? How do you think this should be used?” Long calls with them about going over our proposal and the study design and working with the NTD team, saying, “Is this something that cues could do? Is this something that really just going through the entire protocol with the people there who know the most about this kind of thing and live this every single day?” But then there’s the very data-intensive aspect afterwards, which is once we’re there, how do we make sure that everything that we do and everything that is thought by the people who interface with us gets reflected in our work so it’s not just us trying to speak for other people. I wanna credit my colleague, Caroline Crane and Will McCarthy as well for making this happen, because Caroline Crane was really the biggest proponent of doing a qualitative branch, which means everyone we worked with – she designed, with the help of Dr Tope Olabodun, a structured interview to talk with them at the end of our study about everything that we did, their thoughts on it, the important parts of implementation that we needed to know before we stepped into an actual implementation project, the things that they thought could be improved, the things that they thought were good. Do they think this is promising? Everything. It was a long interview, and we did that with the community health workers who used the workflow. We did this with the people in the Ministry of Health who knew about those key informants that were important to the fieldwork that we did, and then afterwards, we did an analysis looking at the themes that kept coming up, identifying ways that we can improve it, and then we worked those in a newer process in addition to constant dialogue. But really, it was just giving the opportunity, baking into the survey structure or the research structure, that there were opportunities for free-form discussion to be had and recorded for future reference, so that it wasn’t just us speaking, even just the academics speaking, whenever the paper got to the point where it was in manuscript form or whenever you’re reporting anything that we found too academic to other academics, to people that we work with, their local partners or conferences that both us or our local partners wouldn’t see. But as a result, there was a lot of data that we had to collect. We not only were collecting these interviews, but we were also collecting demographic information, which is a long questionnaire talking about where do you get your water from? Where is there contact with water in the reservoir near where you live? And things like that. What is your age? What is your education? Typical demographic information, but on a large scale, it’s a decent quantity of data in addition to the data on the gold standard results versus the Foldscope results and keeping up all of this while it’s all being collected at largely the same time. So, a couple of days before, granted, a lot of us had scientific experience before, but really the experts in fieldwork were the people that we worked with there. You know, Dr Ogunshola, Dr Adebayo, Dr Adunni, our local physician partners, they said, “What are you planning on using for data collection?” We said, “Oh, well, paper forms.” They said, ” You should really consider using something digital.” And so they recommended to us SurveyCTO, and at first, we were like, oh, we have three days. And part of this was something that we thought about, but then we ended up choosing it because we knew that we had a large quantity of data. And we were really doing our best to keep up with learning as we go. And fortunately, we were, for the most part, good listeners and quickly got ourselves a subscription. And fortunately, it was a very easy application to use because we were able to get everything we needed up there effectively. And then when we got to the actual data collection part, it was very easy to organize and I think it saved us a lot of time downstream. And we were able to tailor it to all the different types of data that we needed to be collecting: the positives and negatives of certain samples, the demographic questionnaires, the KeyInformer interviews, the community health worker interviews, which later on was a big benefit to the team because I know that having that quantity of paper data would have been very difficult. But credit to SurveyCTO, and thank you guys, for having me. It was a very easy process to get everything set up online in an expeditious manner. And fortunately, it let us hit the ground running whenever we actually got to that first community.

Marta [00:22:55]:  Do you have any specific examples of things that you have changed because of the data you collected? Like, in terms of operations, in terms of the design of the project, things that were surprising you and made you change something?

Simon [00:23:11]:  It’s a good question. Off the top of my head, the biggest thing would be education. Not the education pillar, but the way in which we taught people. I think we saw in the data, and I’m not sure if this was necessarily surprising. I think we still saw a much better improvement curve than we expected. But I think what we saw in that improvement, that consistent improvement, is that we needed to expand the amount of time that we were there giving structured education on the Foldscope and on the diagnostic process. I think it told us that we needed to relax the training process over a longer period of time, if possible, and we sort of see that reflected this year. Our total number of days of training on the workflow is 15 this year. We have 3 days of training in the city and then 12 days of training in the communities. Now realistically, on a per-two basis, we’re only doing 6 chews at a time, so it’s really only about a week per two. Not every chews going to every single community, only the communities that are closest to them for logistical reasons. But I think relaxing that, formalizing the educational process, making it something that’s easy for it to be rolled out, and just, I think, operationalizing things. Last year, we had an idea of the workflow that we wanted to do, and then we took notes from the people who were there. Credit to my friend and colleague Will McCarthy, who went out last year and did all the teaching, did a lot of the in-person and on-site teaching. He came back and sort of gave the team a rundown on the ways in which we could improve the processes that we used last year, and we’re trying to bake those into the educational regime that we’re giving this year. And so we’re giving a more longitudinal, like, the importance of, or, like, what the study will involve, a day where we just talk about what the study is about to everybody so we’re on the same page, expectations, a day where we go over the actual study design – or, well, not study design, but a day where we go over the workflow before we get out to the communities. And then, of course, once we’re in the communities, just getting reps to an acceptable standard before we or they’re allowed to go and use this workflow for screening in their own communities. Additionally, I think little things like improvements to the schisto filter, improving the portability of the workflow as a whole. So, everything is contained when traveling, improvements to make it easier to keep everything clean; improvements to the reusability of the Foldscope and of the schisto filter. I think little things like that, making adjustments. But the bigger thing is just setting up our study design to try and improve some of the things that we qualitatively heard from the people who are using the Foldscope last year.

Marta [00:25:57]:  That’s incredibly interesting. Just because we’re talking about communities and why communities are so important, I just wanted to reinforce that and ask you: why do you think communities are so important in a broad context, not just for these projects specifically, but for any health-related projects?

Simon [00:26:17]:  I think that’s a great question. I think it’s really twofold. It’s one, experience is probably the most important thing you need in order to be able to understand how an intervention is going to impact the community. And it’s not just the acceptability of whatever you’re doing. It’s also that there’s a certain amount of buy-in and cooperation that you need. And who wants to work with someone that’s not listening to them? I think that’s the important thing that gets missed in some global health or some international public health collaborations is the need for, when you step into someone’s community, it is still strongly their community, and just because you’re working in this area doesn’t mean, in most cases, you don’t have the same level of expertise as the people that you’re partnering with do there. So, I think if you want it to succeed, listen to the people who know the most. And then if you want it to be able to last, realistically, these kinds of things have to be led by the people who are trusted in those communities, and those are the people who have to have a stake in it. So, I think that’s the importance in my mind.

Marta [00:27:16]:  And that makes a lot of sense. It’s what makes the project sustainable. The community is the one that’s going to be empowered and continue implementing these changes. So, I think we already have a really wonderful understanding of the project, but I also just wanted to touch on the other two pillars, the educational tools and the drone imagery and environmental mapping, because I think those are also quite innovative and interesting too. So, specifically on drone imagery and environmental mapping, which I think I mean, I have noticed that more and more organizations are thinking about this type of data collection. Would you highlight any specific struggles or any specific advice for listeners that might be interested in this type of data collection in a way?

Simon [00:28:09]: I think it is interesting. I have seen a lot of people use drone imagery, satellite imagery for everything from schistosomiasis to vector-borne illness, like illnesses carried by mosquitoes. It’s good for targeting habitats on a mass scale, and it’s quite easy to do and labour-unintensive compared to getting out there and trying to identify it yourself over a large swath of land. In terms of pain points, I think the biggest pain point that I’ve seen is just going through the process to make sure it’s okay to be flying a drone in an area if you’re going out into the rural areas. It’s just, like, if you’re going to be doing this work over certain communities, the most relaxed part of your work should be making sure that you spend time talking to the community leaders about what it is you’re doing and conveying everything that you’re doing to the people who live in the area. And then, of course, obtaining the proper permits that you need for the region. I personally work less on the drone mapping project, but some of the people who lead it – my friend Will McCarthy and Christina Salas – work very hard, as well as some undergrads that we work with, who we got connected with, who are from Harvard. I guess something that I could say is that there’s a long process between when you get the actual drone imagery and the point where you have all of the habitats labeled, and I think in the future, maybe there are some improvements that could be made to the pipeline for that. Some of the things that have been thrown out there by people are: are there open-source projects, or are there projects that we can create, that can do some of this identification automatically with a computer, with semantic segmentation or something along those lines? And the answer is probably yes. I think that there’s a lot of improvements that could be made. This is something that, yeah, has taken off a lot recently, and maybe there are tools out there that we haven’t used yet, but I think that improvements will come as this strategy continues to gain traction.

Marta [00:30:11]:  So, Simon, thank you so much for all these insights. For listeners that are really interested in community-led public health interventions? Do you have any specific advice that you’d like to offer?

Simon [00:30:27]:  I think that very much depends on who it is that’s actually pursuing this. When we started, we were a group of medical students and associated professionals. And I have to speak from my position with a lot of determination, but not exactly a huge professional network, at least in this area. So, if you’re someone who has an idea that’s in my position, you’re someone who’s working in an MPH, you’re somebody who’s working on a PhD, or you’re a medical student yourself, wherever you are, strongly believe the most important thing that you can possibly do is one, learn as much as you can about the project that you’re trying to do and two, you don’t need to know everything before you take off with whatever your project is. Cold email people. Find the people who know best and then go there, admit to not knowing things. And then a lot of times, I was surprised by how much people were willing to teach everywhere. Eventually, if you continue, if you bring something to the conversation, you say, “Hey. I’ve done my research. This is where I think there is a gap. This is what I intend to do about the gap.” People will love to talk to you about that. Of course, if you’re someone more established, I think the most important thing to do for you would probably be a little bit different. It would probably be to leverage your professional network. Maybe if you don’t have the necessary context that you need, I don’t think a cold email would hurt you as well. But I think the most important thing is just humility in conversation and trying to get in front of as many experts as possible. Realistically, the most important thing that I think makes people experts is just persistence over a very long period of time, with either the pressure or structure needed to turn you from an amateur to someone dependable. So, I think the biggest thing is just finding the people who know the most and then learning from those people. I mean, I think that’ll be true for the rest of my career.

Marta [00:32:25]:  Do you have any specific optimism about community-driven healthcare solutions?

Simon [00:32:31]:  I do. I think the community health worker, like, the role itself is an innovation that has expanded the traditional health care system in places that those healthcare systems are doing everything that they can with the resources they’ve got within the technology that they currently have. I think we’re seeing right now a strong shift to embracing this role, formalizing the role, and then adopting the community health worker as an integral part of the NTD programs around the world. So, I think in the future, not only should we strive for innovation in the hands of physicians and the traditional structure, but I think in places where we have such disseminated and, I guess, I should say, diseases that predominantly today affect people living in rural areas, where the cost-benefit analysis may not work as well for traditional structures. I think more attention being drawn to the processes and technology in the hands of community health workers, and the ways in which ministries of health are embracing the role in their control programs, I think that is the optimism that I see. And also, just working with the Ministry of Health every day, there’s certainly no shortage of talent in the amazing team that we get to work with in Nigeria. And I think playing to the strengths of people in the regions that are affected by these illnesses, I think, is our best bet to get the most bang for our buck whenever we’re investing in global health change. So, maybe in the future, I have faith that some of these efforts can potentially see improvements. And we have seen improvements in neglected tropical diseases globally. We’ve faltered a little bit with the dissolution of some funding programs over the past couple of years, but I have belief in the perseverance of humanity. And at the very least, me and and my team will continue to work in this area regardless of the environment. So, we were founded the same week. I think we got together, Health in Your Hands, as a group; our first meeting was the same week that USAID began to be dissolved. It was, like, a couple of days after our first meeting with one of our academic mentors. We had sent out a bunch of cold emails. We went to see someone. We were very excited. This was the beginning of 2025. We got all the grants that we wanted to apply to. We stepped out of the meeting, and we looked at our phones. USAID is getting unraveled. And then several of those grants dissolved. And you just adapt, and you improvize to the best of your ability, and you find people who are able to get your work across the line. And there’s no shortage of hard work that’s required, but I think at the very least, there have been a lot of things that should have set back global health a lot more than it has. So, I’m not minimizing some of the setbacks that we’ve had, and I don’t mean to. But I think I’ve seen more than anything, perseverance and talent and, I guess, more than anything, resourcefulness in places where it’s needed the most. So, I think I do still very much have optimism for the future. I think it’s just gonna take a lot of persistence from everybody involved.

Marta [00:35:34]:  Final last question. Do you have any resources or organizations or tools that you like to share with the audience?

Simon [00:35:41]:  Yeah. I talked about this a little bit in the past, but I think the most important tool that we used was SurveyCTO during the data collection phase of our pilot study. And, of course, I think that’s going to be even more important this year as we expand the amount of data that we’re collecting and the number of patients that we’re treating, and the number of communities that are involved. I think that the ability for us to very quickly and with lots of agility get our forms ready to go, I think, is very important whenever, and not only that. I think the most important thing was being able to go into places that did not have connectivity, save the forms, and later on upload them afterwards. That was probably the most important thing for our fieldwork. But the flexibility of the forms, I think, and the flexibility with where we were filling them out, I think, were the two biggest parts of that. In addition to that, other partners and organizations that were helping us out. Well, I think this year, we’re working really closely with a non-profit as well called Fountain Bridge that was founded in part by one of our close colleagues, Ife George, and they’ll be helping us out with a lot of the on-the-ground logistics this year. I think those are the few things.

Marta [00:36:52]:  That’s already a lot. Thank you so much, Simon. It was a pleasure to have you here.

Simon [00:36:57]:  Thank you, Marta. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Marta [00:36:59]:  That wraps up today’s episode with Simon. Today, we discussed Simon’s project with Health in Your Hands called SCOPE. This project is combating schistosomiasis through local diagnostic tools, education, and environmental mapping. We also discussed centering local voices in the design, planning, and implementation of sustainable health initiatives. You can find the relevant links in our episode notes, and don’t forget to subscribe. 

Outro [00:37:30]: Thanks for listening to Survey and Beyond, the data collection podcast by SurveyCTO. If you want to learn more about how SurveyCTO helps organizations collect reliable, secure, and scalable data anywhere in the world, visit www.surveycto.com. And if you’re a fan of Survey and Beyond, consider leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. Your feedback helps more listeners discover these conversations and stay connected to the latest thinking in data collection. Don’t forget to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode. On behalf of the entire SurveyCTO team, thanks again for joining us, and we will see you next time.