eLearning and Health

ZAMFOHR, the Zambia Forum for Health Research, equips health workers, lecturers, teachers, students and managers with the eLearning skills they need for reading reliable, scientific literature electronically. At eLA 2010, Dr Joseph Kasonde, the Executive Director of ZAMFOHR, and Derrick Mwiinga Hamavhwa from the Zambia Forum for Health Research will outline how eLearning improves health practice and policy in Zambia.
More

Click on the mouse to throw the dice and start to play this variation of Parcheesi, an ancient Indian game of crosses and circles. It’s called “1,2,3 Asthma”. Each team advances to move its four virtual counters around the board. To earn points along the way, you need to answer a number of questions about asthma, how to prevent it, control it and about what triggers the attacks. Questions vary in difficulty. Video and sound clips offer additional information and widen the players’ knowledge of asthma, the lung inflammation that affects the lives of 300 million people worldwide. There are games to suit health professionals, asthma sufferers, educators and even the ordinary citizens who just want to know more about the disease. Louise Sauvé is a doctor in educational technology and President and General Director of SAVIE, the Society for Lifelong Learning. She talked to us about “1,2,3 Asthma” and about the benefits of the game as a training tool.
More
Français

In many hospitals throughout the world, it is still standard practice for doctors and nurses to keep handwritten patient files; this is also the case in Africa. However, these files can easily get lost, and if patient data have to be transferred from one medical institution to another, the files can take a long time to arrive. Digital documents that can be shared and stored easily could go a long way to combating such problems. To help remedy this situation, at the beginning of January 2010, the IT managers of several hospitals in Tanzania began gearing themselves up to test a new ‘digital pen’; one that can convert doctor’s handwriting into a compact, easy-to-archive digital file.
More

In Brussels, hands wearing surgical gloves make precise and skilful incisions into an abdomen. In Senegal, attentive participants of the “Demonstrations of Telemedicine” pre-conference workshop at eLearning Africa watch simultaneously on a big screen: The transnational videosurgery, carried out by Professor Guy-Bernard Cadière in Brussels for Senegalese medical students, was a great start to three days packed with topics concerning healthcare. The variety on offer – video conferencing on surgical matters, serious gaming for “Combating Yellow Fever“, malaria documentation, HIV treatment and much more – showed the level of quality, as well as the urgency, of innovative medical workforce training. On the African continent, where about one million physicians, nurses and midwives are lacking and basic medical services cannot be guaranteed, eLearning is seen as an indispensable means to develop human resources. At eLearning Africa, experts from all over Africa and abroad had the chance to learn more about new learning technologies and systems, technical requirements, sustainable content development and implementation strategies.
More
Français

Les spécialistes internationaux en chirurgie peuvent désormais opérer dans les hôpitaux du monde entier sans quitter leur propre pays. eLearning Africa 2009 en apportera la preuve le mercredi 27 mai 2009, lors d’un des évènements de pré-conférence les plus attendus. Les Professeurs Cheikh Tidiane Touré et Bara Diop, à Dakar, en collaboration avec le Professeur Guy-Bernard Cadière, à Bruxelles, ont mis en place trois démonstrations pratiques de formation chirurgicale menées à distance à l’aide des moyens que leurs offrent les nouvelles technologiques. Que ce soit entre le Sénégal et la Belgique ou entre un centre hospitalier de Dakar et un centre de santé de la campagne sénégalaise, les nouvelles technologies éliminent les distances et permettent d’offrir à tous les étudiants et personnels médicaux, jusque dans les régions les plus reculées, un enseignement de pointe.
en lire plus
English

The Safouley Republic, District of Massidou, Monday, March 3rd: A young man presenting signs of yellow fever is rushed to the district hospital. Dr Ba, District Medical Officer, must remain vigilant. If the case is confirmed, an epidemiological investigation involving expertise in epidemiology, entomology and virology will need to be carried out. Dr Ba and his team will have to determine the size of the epidemic, find a vector and create a response.

This fictional case is taken from an immersive distance training tool using serious gaming, which is now available for physicians all across Africa. The CD-ROM, produced by WHO in collaboration with the Agence de Médecine Préventive (AMP), offers the chance to play the role of the District Medical Officer, the epidemiologist or the virologist, and thus be an actor in an epidemiological investigation.
More
Français

A malaria vaccine is still the best tool to fight the malaria epidemic in many developing countries. Since 2005, the first human trials of a vaccine have been conducted with encouraging results. Most of the volunteers who received the vaccine developed strong and in some cases long-lasting immune responses. However, as researchers know from earlier vaccine trials, the crucial question is whether these immune responses mean that vaccinated people are actually protected against malaria. One way to test this is to expose the vaccinated trial participants to malaria and see if they are protected. However, this risky test is not ethically justified during the early stages of vaccine testing.
More
Français

At the World AIDS Conference, currently taking place in Mexico City, former African leaders have launched a regional campaign to put pressure on politicians. They are urging African governments to increase efforts to combat the virus. An unprecedented mobilisation for prevention involving political leaders as well as all sectors of civil society should be priority number one for all in the fight against AIDS, Festus Mugae, the former president of Botswana said in his opening address on Sunday, August 3rd.
More

Sub-Saharan Africa is facing a human resource crisis in health care provision – a crisis that poses a huge challenge to the achievement of the health-related Millennium Development Goals. At eLearning Africa, Dr Emil Jones Asamoah-Odei from the WHO Regional Office for Africa will make a case for the use of eLearning for responding to the human resource for health crisis in sub-Saharan Africa and review experiences from Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO). eLA newsletter reporter Edris Kisambira introduces the topic.
More

© healthnet.org

With almost twenty years of experience in providing digital information to the healthcare community in Africa and other developing regions, AED–SATELLIFE serves as an important think tank and innovator in the fields of community building and information dissemination. The organisation, established by the cardiologist Dr. Bernard Lown, who was also a co-founder of the Nobel Prize winning IPPNW (International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War), is a leader in large-scale implementations of mobile devices to train nurses and clinical staff. eLA Editor Nina Wittrock spoke with Andrew Sideman, Director of Development, and Pamela Scorza, Information Associate, about SATELLIFE’s current and future projects in Africa and how they are linked to eLearning.
More

Fundamental to the success of what have become known as “Virtual Patients” is the narrative, says Professor David Dewhurst from the University of Edinburgh. The virtual “cases” have to be believable so that students become immersed in the virtual environment, take their assumed role seriously and understand that their decisions have consequences. At eLearning Africa 2008, Prof. Dewhurst will demonstrate how medical teachers at the University of Malawi create quality virtual patients for their students.
More

Lori Waters, who gave a presentation on Seeing Science: Creating Scientific Visualisations to Increase Understanding of HIV Infection at eLearning Africa 2007, came home from the Continent short a laptop and camera, but full of something even more valuable — the ability to help. In the following piece she depicts a successful project journey in the course of her stay in Nairobi and recalls some impressions she gained at the conference.
More