A WHO Academy learner story
9 October 2024 Departmental update Rwanda Reading time: 1 min (318 words)
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, co-director of the Emergency 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.
The online elements of the course, designed by the WHO Academy’s adult-learning experts, in collaboration with WHO’s Clinical Services and Systems Unit, feature animated and live-action skills videos, interactive quizzes and step-by-step assessments. Face-to-face sessions, led by BEC Master Trainers, focus on translating knowledge learned online into practical clinical skills. Both components are required to complete the BEC course.
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.
World Health Organization
