After I took charge of the Director General of Health Services, I started routine video conferencing with the divisional and district health managers from November 01, 2016. Each Monday at 9:00 am, the video conference was held. We used to review the newspaper articles of the last week to see what are the problems reported. Then, we asked the respective health manager to describe or clarify the issue. We encouraged for open discussion and made decision on how to solve the problem and who to take the responsibility within a time frame. Beside newspaper review, we also discussed the implementation progress of different health programs and how we were doing in reaching the targets like SDGs for health, etc. The video conferencing system was state of the art with high quality camera, large screen, and dedicated bandwidth, resulting in crisp video and audio quality. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the video conferencing system worked as an efficient tool to make communications with the health managers across the country, inter-ministerial meetings, give directions to them and holding online training.
These infrastructures were developed much before the Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Meet acquired better quality. We also used unified communication system of CISCO to connect all the sub-districts, union health facilities and community clinics in the video network to enable them connect with any device, any bandwidth, etc.