Training Health Care Providers Around the Globe

Stanford’s Department of Emergency Medicine launched a 15-module online course to train healthcare workers in low- to middle-income countries (LMICs) and rural and remote areas on recognizing and treating COVID-19.

In LMICs, where healthcare systems are more likely to be under-resourced and overwhelmed, non-physician healthcare workers constitute most healthcare providers. 

“Our LMIC partners were asking us where they could get ventilators and people to manage them,” explains Matthew Strehlow, MD, director of Stanford Emergency Medicine International. “But even with skilled technicians, most patients on ventilators died. It seemed clear we could have a bigger impact if we trained health care workers in identifying, evaluating, and treating COVID symptoms before they reached the ventilator stage.”

COVID-19 Training for Health Care Providers was developed in just 14 weeks and to date, more than 120,000 learners around the globe have enrolled in the course that is now available in Spanish, Hindi, French, and Portuguese. 

The African Forum for Research and Education in Health (AFREhealth) has partnered with Stanford University to promote and disseminate the course throughout Africa. AFREHealth is an interdisciplinary group of leaders from more than 60 medical and nursing schools in Africa.

The Pakistani government and Educast, a Pakistani-Saudi virtual health platform, utilized Stanford’s online course to train more than 400 Pakistani women physicians in caring for COVID-19 patients remotely. Stanford emergency medicine physicians then held webinars to answer questions and review challenging cases.