Education and Training

Modernizing the way health care professionals are educated and engaged in their vital work requires a collaborative and coordinated approach among many players. The Health Council convened the summit on health human resources to focus on practical, short-term solutions. This report attempts to capture the lively discussion and encouraging examples of innovation brought forward at that forum, organized into four theme areas: education and training, scopes of practice, workplace practices and planning. [adapted from author]

This presentation describes the benefits and challenges of structured on-the-job training with evidence from a case study of Nepal.

Within the Southern African prevention of mother to child transmission (PMTCT) programmes, counsellors talk with pregnant mothers about a number of interrelated decisions and behaviour changes. Current counselling has been characterised as ineffective in eliciting behaviour change and as adopting a predominantly informational and directive approach. Motivational interviewing (MI) was chosen as a more appropriate approach to guide mothers in these difficult decisions, as it is designed for conversations about behaviour change. MI has not previously been attempted in this context. This paper reflects on how MI can be incorporated successfully into PMTCT counselling and what lessons can be learnt regarding how to conduct training with counsellors.

Clinical skills and the ability to perform procedures is a vital part of general medicine. Teaching these skills to aspiring doctors is a complex task and it starts with a good theoretical preparation and some practical experience at university. On graduating from university, each doctor is faced with the task of transforming theoretical knowledge into the practical, procedural skills of a competent professional. This study aims to assess the perceptions of intern doctors working in regional hospitals in the Western Cape of their skills training both at undergraduate level and during the intern year.

The aim of this booklet is to give pharmacy students and practitioners information about patient counseling, guidance for organizing a patient counseling event, how to develop courses about counseling, the role of community pharmacists in promoting patient counseling, and guidelines for continuous professional development in patient counseling and communication skills. [adapted from author]

Following health sector reform, Ethiopia started training new categories of health workers. This study addresses students’ perspectives regarding their training and career plans. This study suggests that the current training programs have serious inadequacies that need to be addressed. [from abstract]

Training in communication skills for health professionals is important, but there are substantial barriers to individual in-person training for practicing clinicians. This study evaluated the feasibility and desirability of online training and sought suggestions for future courses. [adapted from abstract]

This article discusses the implementation of training programmes in field epidemiology as a strategy for improving the number and quality of health workers. [adapted from abstract]

This article describes the experience of Guatemalan students at Cuba’s Latin American Medical School. The students’ education emphasizes health problems and diseases characterizing the epidemiological situation in their home country and in-depth courses in disaster management, as well as clinical experience in Guatemala. [adapted from author]

This article describes the efforts within the Cuban medical system to collaborate with health authorities around the globe to develop medical education programs to train such urgently-needed professionals with curricula formulated to meet international standards and local health needs. Special emphasis is placed on the assistance that Cuba provided to Gambia in establishing a medical school in that country. [from author]

This article describes the Cuban medical education system. The role of Cuban physicians internationally is discussed, as well as the placement of international students in Cuban medical schools.

The world’s 1,691 medical schools and 5,492 nursing schools are not producing enough graduates to cover the massive global deficit of doctors, nurses, and midwives. One scaling-up initiative addressing these critical shortages is Cuba’s Latin American Medical School. This article describes those efforts. [adapted from introduction]

The Institute of Medicine’s Academy of Science has recommended that medical schools incorporate information on CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) into required medical school curricula so that graduates will be able to competently advise their patients in the use of CAM. The report states a need to study models of systems that integrate CAM and allopathic medicine. The authors present Cuba’s health care system as one such model and describe how CAM (or natural and traditional medicine) is integrated into all levels of clinical care and medical education in Cuba. The authors conclude that there is much to learn from the Cuban experience to inform U.S.

This presentation was given at the First Forum on Human Resources for Health in Kampala. It details the financial issues involved in scaling up health worker training such as the cost of hiring additional staff, educating health workers and expanding training capacity. It also outlines the current and possible future sources of increasing expenditure for health worker training. [adapted from author]

This presentation was given at the First Forum on Human Resources for Health in Kampala. It discusses the need for scaled-up management and leadership training to equip healthcare professionals with the skills, experience and knowledge to manage health programs effectively and how private sector approaches to this challege offer a strategic resource to improve the management and output of health systems. [adapted from author]

This presentation was given at the First Forum on Human Resources for Health in Kampala. It discusses the key features of the Problem-Based Learning/Community-Based Education and Service innovations to the health curricula at Makerere University, why they implemented these improvements and the benefits they have seen from the program.

This presentation was given at the First Forum on Human Resources for Health in Kampala. It discusses training Clinical Officers, a cadre of mid-level health professionals, as a method of filling the health worker gap in a post-conflict area.

This presentation was given at the First Forum on Human Resources for Health in Kampala. It introduces the reasons behind the formation of the Task Force for Scaling up Education and Training of Health Workers and what it will accomplish.

This presentation was given at the First Forum on Human Resources for Health in Kampala. It discusses educational strategies for training health workers to scale up service delivery in Brazil.

This article describes the work of the Task Force for Scaling Up Education and Training for Health Workers, which was established to create to create practical proposals for a massive increase in the education and training of health workers, as part of a systematic effort to build up health systems in developing countries. [adapted from author]

This document asks how leadership contributes to measurable changes in organizational performance and how to evaluate the outcomes of leadership development programs in developing countries.

This course will build the skills of those who are in a position to support change agents in health service delivery. The course focus is on changes in clinical practices, behavioral practices of providers, and management practices at service delivery sites. [adapted from author]

This toolkit was written for and by HIV trainers in Africa. It has been designed to help trainers plan and organise educational sessions with community leaders or organised groups to raise awareness and promote practical action to challenge HIV stigma and discrimination. [author’s description]

The aim of this study was to establish whether a web-based package on the diagnosis of respiratory disease would be as effective and as acceptable to final year medical students as tutor-led methods of teaching the same material. [from abstract]

As a group, indigenous Australians are much less healthy and more likely to die at younger ages than their non-indigenous counterparts. Training more indigenous people as health workers could help to reduce these startling inequalities, say experts. [author’s description]

The study was carried out to evaluate short term effects of one to one educational intervention approach, conducted with 40 drug sellers in order to improve the private sector’s practices, compliance and performance in using the national treatment guidelines for malaria and other common childhood (diarrhoea, acute respiratory tract infection-ARI) illnesses in Kibaha district-Tanzania. [from abstract]

Programs and services need to be sensitively designed to facilitate women’s access to physical and social needs. This paper narrates the experience of working with health providers from public and private sectors, community, local government representatives and community-based organizations. Through transformative learning, this endeavour focused on initiating a process of sensitization on gender related health issues for women. [from abstract]

This retrospective study assessed the effects of pre- and post-training programme for healthcare professionals about breastfeeding. [from abstract]

This article evaluates a malaria in-service training for community health nurses working at a village level. The program included a computer-based training package, the first of its kind for health professionals in Gambia. [adapted from abstract]

The overall objective of community-based medical education (CBME) is to produce highly qualified doctors in sufficient numbers to meet the health needs of the nation at community and hospital levels. In the current program, medical students undertake an eight-week residential posting in their final year. The objective of this study was to assess the communities’ awareness, perception and participation in the CBME program. [adapted from introduction]