Date: Wednesday 3rd August 2022
Time: 12:00 – 13:30 East Africa Time (EAT)
Convener: AfriPEN
This experiential workshop aims to model interprofessional education (IPE) through an unfolding clinical scenario. The participants will experience first hand what IPE is and what it is not, and discuss strategies of enhancing IPE in their institutions.
Enabling Medical Education Capacity-Building in Africa Equitable access to health care and high-quality medical education and training remains a persistent problem in many countries in the Global South. Africa has been and will be, for the foreseeable future, gripped by a severe shortage of healthcare workers. According to the World Health Organization, the current global shortfall is 7 million healthcare workers and it is set to increase to 13 million by 2035.
In addition, some countries in Africa do not have a single medical school. Others, such as Ethiopia, have expanded the number of medical schools as well as the number of students per school - both of which lead to significant quality challenges due to a lack of professors and at times junior academic staff. Ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being to all at all ages (UN: SDG3) can only be tackled by increasing the capacity of medical education systems worldwide. This means supporting quality and achieving more scalable medical education for nurses, doctors, and other healthcare workers through carefully tailored capacity-building efforts in a cost effective and adaptive manner.
The session will focus on the relevant aspects of digitally supported capacity building in low-income countries, covering technical challenges as well as content curation and creation. We will draw on Lecturio's experience in building innovative online delivery models for medical education, running schools in under-resourced environments as well as supporting existing schools both individually and via national projects.
In particular, we will highlight our experiences in Ethiopia, which was launched in partnership with the Ministry of Health of Ethiopia and the German Corporation for International Cooperation to support innovation in medical education in Ethiopia. This capacity-building project succeeded in digitalizing the national curriculum, providing an online learning platform equipped with evidence-based resources, producing content with local experts on equipment use & maintenance, and offering continuous training & support. Emphasis is continuously maintained on academic integrity, improved quality of health services, and sustainable cooperation between the public and private sectors.