Over the last months, all efforts have been made to avoid service interruption, while also ensuring the safety of our staff, clients and our community. This has been especially challenging in the case of our social education programs, which rely on face-to-face workshops held in schools, the workplace and communities.
Schools are still opened in Taiwan* but activities involving more than 100 students are now restricted, which means that school-wide activities are no longer possible. Furthermore, to protect our clients with weaker immune systems, we no longer invite them to attend activities to share their stories. And although we provide schools with online educational material that teachers can use in class, over two thirds of schools still prefer having our social educators lead activities.
To overcome these difficulties, our social educators have been experimenting over the last few weeks with video conferencing to organize social education activities. Our social educators can remain in Sunshine's office, they can be in an empty classroom or they can be in front of students in one single classroom and transmit via video conference the educational workshop to schoolchildren in many classrooms at the same time.
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Social educator carrying out in a classroom in front of students a Face Equality workshop,
which is re-transmitted simultaneously to other classrooms in the school.
We've also found a way to continue allowing our clients to take part in educational activities, either by pre-recording their intervention, or by having them join remotely through video conferencing. One oral cancer survivor who pre-recorded his intervention said: "This is quite a new experience for me. At first, I didn't know how to properly look into the camera and without a real audience in front of me, I was very nervous, but with practice, I'll get better and better." A burn survivor who joined an activity via video conferencing said: “Apart from the occasional technical glitch, it really feels like I'm there with students and I can still interact with them."
Oral cancer survivor pre-records his intervention for a prevention workshop.
The epidemic has disrupted many aspects of our lives and created challenges for our services, but despite all of this, oral cancer prevention, burn prevention and the promotion of Face Equality continue.
* As of April 14, 2020.
