First contact health workers who care for patients with acute illness or injury need to have unshakable confidence in their fundamental skills. For seven years, WHO's Basic Emergency Care course has run successfully as a five-day, in-person programme*. Now, the WHO Academy has reimagined and redeveloped the course in a hybrid format, reducing the in-person component to just two days. In Rwanda, the benefits of this new approach are already being felt.
It's late August and twelve members of the Accident and Emergency team at King Faisal hospital in Kigali, Rwanda have come together to complete the WHO Basic Emergency Care (BEC) training. They have already completed the self-paced BEC course on the WHO Academy's online platform and are now putting their knowledge and practical skills to the test in-order to be certified as BEC providers.
This pilot training, organised by Dr Tsion Firew, head of the emergency medicine residency programme at the hospital, is a new, scalable approach to BEC roll-out. Trained as a BEC instructor, Dr Firew can independently organise and conduct practical skills sessions much more easily, thanks to the reduced financial, logistical and time demands in comparison with the five-day in-person format.
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The online elements of the course, designed by the WHO Academy's adult-learning experts, feature animated and live-action skills videos, interactive quizzes and step-by-step assessments. The face-to-face elements then test learners' abilities to execute clinical skills.
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The new format has since been tested in Kibuye and Kibungo and Dr Firew is confident that it will help reach many more health workers across Rwanda over the coming months. The WHO Academy hybrid BEC course will be offered in several other countries in 2024.
*BEC is a joint WHO/ICRC/IFEM course. You can learn more about the course and its impact here.
