UNFPA teams up with Intel to create e-learning modules to train midwives in places short of healthcare workers and instructors to tutor them
(Corrects figure for deficit of health workers in paragraph 2)
“The biggest problem in the developing world is that we don’t have quality tutors and lack of healthcare workers,” Geeta Lal told me in Kuala Lumpur after the close of a two-day midwifery symposium at the Women Deliver conference, one of the world’s largest gatherings devoted to the health and rights of women and girls.
“There’s a huge deficit of healthcare workers - about 4 to 5 million workers are lacking. Even where we have these workers, they are not properly trained. That’s what causes maternal and newborn mortality.”
Lal, the midwifery programme coordinator for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), succinctly summed up the crux of the problem pregnant women face in the impoverished, hard-to-reach pockets of the world. Each year, 287,000 women die from pregnancy-related causes, while 5.7 million suffer severe illnesses or disabilities.
To close this learning gap, UNFPA – teaming up with microchip giant Intel, the U.N. World Health Organization (WHO) and the Johns Hopkins University-affiliated NGO Jhpiego - devised multimedia e-learning modules that are currently being piloted in Bangladesh and Ghana.
Most e-learning programmes are basically uploaded textbooks, Lal said, but these new ones are interactive and include graphics and videos, making the lessons more accessible.
There are three modules so far, training health care workers on how to handle conditions such as pre-eclampsia and eclampsia, post-partum hemorrhage, and prolonged and obstructed labour. They also address clinical decision-making, giving instruction on proper medicine dosages and protocols and provide checklists key to managing emergency cases.
According to UNFPA and its partners, enhancing skills of frontline healthcare providers in these three areas alone would help prevent half of all maternal deaths in countries with high maternal mortality rates.
E-LEARNING IN REMOTE VILLAGES?
The e-learning modules - which can be adapted to any language -do require a computer, electricity, computer literacy, and Internet access, though Intel’s technical expert on the project said that the heaviest data – such as high-definition videos – could be shipped on thumb drives to health centres, where workers could upload them onto their laptops or tablets.
The modules run on the skoool Healthcare Education platform (skoool HE, for short, and you read it right, with three O’s in skoool), which tracks the worker’s usage. Offline, it records what modules are opened and how often, as well as how workers performed on the embedded quizzes. The Internet connection is necessary to send this usage information so managers know whether or not the modules are useful.
“It holds onto that information until the health worker returns to the hospital where there might be a connection. When they connect back at the hospital – whether it’s a day later, a week later or a month later – the device has saved the records of how they’ve done so that then that information gets transferred up to the cloud so that administrators or managers know are the people I work with being successful with this capability,” Mathew Taylor, the information and communication technology solutions architect for the Intel World Ahead Programme, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation during a demonstration of the module.
“There will be places where this won’t work, but with a tool like this, you’ll know because if they’re not using it, you won’t see the results showing up.”
When I told him I could not yet envision this e-learning module in the middle of nowhere – where it’s most needed – Taylor made a good point: “There are people in the middle of nowhere who have cell phones.”
BETTER THAN A BOOK
The true test of these e-learning modules’ success will be the results from the pilot programmes in Bangladesh and Ghana. Meanwhile, some midwivery experts from Africa are optimistic.
“It’s more useful than a book because there are some demonstrations that require gestures. It is necessary that people see the images. It’s much more clear… learning with videos is much easier,” Henriette Eke Mbula, of UNFPA in Democratic Republic of Congo, said, pointing out that comprehension can be difficult from textbooks alone.
Others said the module would help places like South Sudan, where there are limited opportunities for continuing education. The fact that it is interactive and based on new technologies would also attract young people considering the profession.
“Everything is moving forward. Midwifery cannot stay behind while everything is moving forward,” said Frederica Hanson, who heads the midwifery programme of UNFPA in Ghana.
“There’s a lot of interest in technology in upcoming midwives. In Ghana, we are training the young midwives. In order to get people interested in midwifery, we have to reach the young people… they are interested in technology.”
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
