Australia Awards Vanuatu recently hosted a professional development seminar in Santo on Data Analysis and Visualization to replicate those seminars previously hosted in Port Vila. With a rising number of alumni residing within Vanuatu’s largest island of Santo, the seminar was an excellent capacity building opportunity for Santo alumni network members to apply within their professional sectors.
Alumni represented various sectors, both private and public, and included employees from the Northern Provincial Hospital (NPH), Vanuatu Agriculture College, the Maritime Regulator, Department of Lands, amongst others.
Hosted at the VNPF conference room and facilitated by Marc Delrieu from Vanuatu Data Science, the seminar provided great insight and practical applications of data and visual analytics, an emerging field concerned with analysing, modeling, and visualising complex high dimensional data. This included the translation of information into a visual context, such as maps and graphs, to make data easier for people to interpret. With the main goal of data visualisation being to identify patterns, trends and outliers in large data sets.
Medical Superintendent of NPH, Dr. Andy Ilo, attended the seminar to further his knowledge on data fields and apply these concepts to enhance hospital services. Dr. Ilo explains ‘As a manager of NPH, I see more opportunities created through the analysis and collection of data, being presented in a more meaningful and structured way to enhance more robust planning and implementation of services. It taught me a lot in the way of how data is processed and can be used effectively for greater positive impacts at the hospital‘.
A data-driven mindset derives powerful insights useful for improving an organisation’s operations. Dr. Ilo agrees, further explaining ‘this will assist the hospital management in making right decisions based on true and meaningful information. It will also assist each unit in the hospital to be able to collect data and format it in a way that is easy to understand. I hope there will be more of these hands-on trainings to assist us in the future‘.