On April 23, to celebrate the International Spanish Language Day, the Pan American Health Organization PAHO and OpenWHO co-hosted a webinar with testimonies on how the virtual training has been instrumental in defending public health and protecting lives in the Americas. During the webinar speakers from across the Americas shared their experiences on how PAHO's Virtual Campus and OpenWHO platforms enabled rapid national scale-up for training during the first year COVID19 pandemic, making life-saving knowledge available, accessible and locally contextualized.

Watch the webinar recording here.

#LearningSavesLives Webinar Series

Data: 5 de maio de 2021

Hora: 8:00h Brasil, 11:00h São Tomé e Príncipe, 12h Angola, 13h Suíça / Moçambique, 20h Timor-Leste

REGISTE-SE AGORA

Orador principal

• Bernardo Mariano Junior, Director, Saúde Digital e Inovação Director de Informação OMS

Palestrantes

• Professor Alex Jones Flores Cassenote, Epidemiologista FMUSP, Brasil
• Janine Giuberti Coutinho, Doutoramento em Nutrição Humana e Especialista em Saúde Pública
• Luis dos Reis, Chefe de Equipa, Planeamento e Gestão de Programas, Saúde Ambiental e Programa de Emergência Sanitária, Timor-Leste, ​OMS
• Vilfrido Santana Gil, Conselheiro para Prevenção e Controlo de Doenças/Ponto focal emergência sanitária. São Tomé e Príncipe, OMS

Moderador

• Mônica Diniz Durães, Consultora Nacional, Unidade Técnica Capacidades Humanas para a Saúde, Escritório da OPAS/OMS no Brasil

Responder aos desafios colocados pela pandemia da COVID-19 requer o uso de todas as ferramentas que a humanidade tem à sua disposição - uma das mais importantes é garantir que os trabalhadores da linha de frente em todo o mundo tenham acesso ao conhecimento mais recente em seu próprio idioma. A língua portuguesa não é apenas uma das línguas mais difundidas no mundo, - com mais de 265 milhões de falantes espalhados por todos os continentes - mas também a língua mais falada no hemisfério sul. O português é um dos principais idiomas de comunicação internacional e uma língua com forte projeção geográfica destinada a crescer, especialmente em África.

Por ocasião do Dia Internacional da Língua Portuguesa, ouviremos em primeira mão como falantes de português em todo o mundo estão respondendo à pandemia, e como os mais recentes conhecimentos sobre a COVID-19 estão sendo disponibilizados para serem usados e disseminados em todo o mundo. Exploraremos as oportunidades de aprendizagem disponíveis para falantes de português, e mapearemos alguns dos desafios futuros que se colocam, não só na resposta à atual pandemia mas também no acesso a conhecimentos essenciais de saúde pública que ajudarão as sociedades a se reconstruirem melhor após a pandemia.

A equipe da OpenWHO.org comemorou recentemente o primeiro aniversário da publicação de seu primeiro curso COVID-19. Desde então, disponibilizamos 29 cursos COVID-19 em diversos idiomas, sendo 9 deles o português. Embora tenhamos tido uma aceitação significativa durante a pandemia, com mais de 5 milhões de inscrições na plataforma OpenWHO, sabemos que muitos mais falantes da língua portuguesa poderiam se beneficiar do conhecimento oferecido pela OpenWHO

REGISTE-SE AGORA

#OpenWHO #LearningSavesLives #HealthForAll #linguaportuguesa #aprenderemportuguês

Strengthening COVID-19 response with the latest science

The rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic called for the latest science and technical knowledge on COVID-19 to be disseminated quickly to Indonesia's health workforce. Amidst various information sources, health workers seek a credible source of knowledge to guide them in responding to COVID-19. OpenWHO courses provide trusted and structured courses based on the latest science to fill in the knowledge gap in the COVID-19 response.

WHO Indonesia technical team selects the courses to be disseminated based on identified needs on the ground. All course materials are translated into the Indonesian language and context, with a rigorous editing process to ensure technical accuracy. On 7 March 2020, in a matter of days since the first COVID-19 case was reported in the country, WHO in Indonesia launched the first OpenWHO course on ePROTECT and Infection Prevention and Control in the Indonesian language.

To broaden the reach of OpenWHO, courses are promoted widely through social media, email, and group chats across our networks and partners. Each course information and registration link are also announced on the Ministry of Health's (MoH) emerging diseases website and the Indonesian Hospital Association (PERSI) 's website.

MoH Head of Basic Immunization Unit, Dr Dyan Sawitri, said that OpenWHO courses have equipped her team with the technical knowledge and operational know-how needed to strengthen Indonesia's COVID-19 response. The 'COVID 19 vaccination training for health workers', in particular, has provided comprehensive information that covers vaccine types, logistical procedures, cold chain preparation, and implementation steps. More than 1300 participants have enrolled in this training since it was launched on 24 February 2021

"The OpenWHO course on COVID-19 vaccination training for health workers course has provided technical knowledge on all aspect of COVID-19 vaccination for my team and health workers in general. We often get questions from the subnational level on different aspects of COVID-19, and we always refer to WHO recommendations and content from the OpenWHO course as one of our key references. A well-trained and confident health workforce is a crucial pillar to ensure safe vaccination across Indonesia, and OpenWHO is strengthening our health workforce with the latest science," said Dr Dyan. "Communication aspects of COVID-19 vaccination are important to fight misinformation, and it is also a topic that is rarely discussed in technical health meetings, so it is good to see that this topic is covered as part of the OpenWHO course", she said.

The MoH continues to adopt various WHO technical guidance in the national technical guidance on COVID 19 response. Content from the OpenWHO courses is also adopted in MoH training modules. As of 12 April 2021, more than 27 000 participants have enrolled in the eight OpenWHO courses available in Indonesian.

OpenWHO欢庆中国语言日!

在COVID-19全球大流行期间，OpenWHO持续出品了许多中文课程。现在平台上已有10个不同主题的中文课程上线。

今天就加入我们： https://openwho.org/courses?lang=cn

#学习拯救生命

OpenWHO celebrates the Chinese language day!

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, OpenWHO has continued to produce courses in Chinese, currently hosting 10 different topical courses.

Join today: https://openwho.org/courses?lang=cn

#LearningSavesLives

Monthly newsletter

You can access the most recent newsletter here. Please note that currently the newsletter is available in English only, but the newsletter highlights can be accessed in Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

COVID- 19: Partnerships to bring training to the frontline?

Celebrating UN Spanish Language Day and its importance in bringing life-saving knowledge to the frontline in the Americas during health emergencies

Into the second year of the COVID19 pandemic, real-time training has become a mainstay of the COVID-19 response. On 23 April, to mark the International day of Spanish language, the Pan American Health organization and The World Health Organization will co-host a webinar on how virtual training has been instrumental in saving lives and protecting those at risk in the Americas. The webinar will be in Spanish with interpretation in English and will focus on how the PAHO Virtual Campus and the global OpenWHO.org platforms quickly scaled up training and made life-saving knowledge available in languages of the Americas. Join experts and practitioners from across the region and globally to discover how they innovated to bring knowledge and skills to the frontline.

You can register for this webinar here.

Consultation on the draft WHO Global Learning Strategy

The World Health Organization invites you to participate in an online public consultation on the draft WHO Global Learning Strategy. The objective of this consultation is to assess the level to which the approach, objectives, and goal of the draft Learning Strategy respond to the life-long-learning needs and capacity development efforts in stakeholder organizations.

The study is in two parts - the end of the first round has been set for 23 April. You can access the online public consultation here.

COVID-19 vaccine-related courses available in all UN languages and other national languages

Working with WHO expert teams, OpenWHO launched several courses to transfer critical knowledge on vaccination for the evolving COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, the COVID-19 vaccination training for health workers course is available in all UN languages and several other national languages such as Portuguese, Indonesian, or Vietnamese. The Orientation to national deployment and vaccination planning for COVID-19 vaccines course is now available in English, Chinese, French, and Russian with Spanish and Arabic to come soon.

New courses and languages for COVID-19

New courses launched

We are pleased to announce the following COVID-19 courses which have recently become available on OpenWHO:

• COVID-19 vaccine-specific resources: The purpose of this course is to provide key information about COVID-19 vaccines and it is intended to be used by vaccinators, clinicians, logisticians, and other focal points involved in COVID-19 vaccination. The course is available in all UN languages and Portuguese.

• Guidance on mask use in the context of COVID-19: This course is based on scientific evidence and WHO guidance relevant to the use of masks for reducing the spread of COVID-19 virus in different settings.

• Clinical management of patients with COVID-19 - Initial approach to the acutely ill patient: The goal of this training is to prepare and support health providers as they provide emergency care to seriously ill patients. Coming soon

New translations

The following 32 translations for COVID-19 have been launched this month:

• COVID-19 vaccination training for health workers in Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Macedonian, Portuguese and Vietnamese
• Orientation to national deployment and vaccination planning for COVID-19 vaccines in Chinese, French, Russian, Macedonian, Portuguese and Vietnamese
• COVID-19 vaccine-specific resources in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese
• Introduction to COVID-19 in Esperanto, Telugu and Thai
• Long-term care facilities in French and Russian
• eProtect in Tamil
• IPC for COVID-19 in Tamil and Thai
• The Public Health Emergency Operations Centre (PHEOC) in Macedonian
• Clinical management of patients with COVID-19: Rehabilitation of patients with COVID -19 in Albanian and Macedonian

All courses for COVID-19 can be accessed here. You can use the toolbar to filter courses by language.

Updates to course content

The following course materials have been revised to reflect updates to the technical content and are now up to date:

• Introduction to COVID-19, Module 1 in Arabic, Chinese, English, Spanish and Russian. All other languages are currently being updated.

Complete list of COVID-19 learning resources

We are pleased to announce that OpenWHO now has 204 courses for COVID-19 spread across 47 languages and 30 topics. You can access our catalogue which shows all courses and languages available for COVID-19 here. For other health-related topics, you can access the catalogue here

Call for applicants for 2nd WHO training in infodemic management

Applications for WHO's global infodemic manager training course are open. This cohort will be the second group of professionals to become skilled and certified WHO infodemic responders. Upon completion of the training, they can be deployed to different country assignments around the globe. WHO is proud to partner again with US CDC for this infodemic management training. US CDC is providing technical expertise, facilitation, and training support.

• Online training runs for four weeks from 1 - 30 June 2021
• Deadline for submission is 9 May 2021 at 18:00 Geneva, Switzerland time

Find the full guidelines for how to apply here.

Best wishes,

OpenWHO team

COVID19 has profoundly shaken the time-tested traditions of education in medicine and health. As millions of medical and other health sciences students and their teachers remained in lockdown, dispersed across geographies, new methods of approaching distance and distributed learning have come to the fore. Some believe that medical education will never be the same again. While universities were able to make the shift from lecture halls to digital classrooms, with varying degrees of success for knowledge transfer, transferring skills and competency development that are essential for the caring professions, remain a major challenge. The know-do gap is now in sharp focus. How will the COVID19-inspired changes to medical and health sciences education, offered by universities and in-service training, evolve? Are we looking at the future of medical and health professional education

Webinar replay: https://youtu.be/UVRmIT6Zevo

Link to a short video with quotes: https://youtu.be/qcEACTisisg

The OpenWHO platform prioritizes translation of learning resources to reach populations as extensively as possible. Providing courses in learners' languages can help remove the barriers to learning and make it accessible to more learners. This means providing learning in the languages of those in need. OpenWHO hosts a COVID-19 explanatory resource in Indian sign language. This is currently being accessed by 53 000 learners, and 47 000 have already received a certificate of participation.

This learning resource is an example of OpenWHOs collaboration with volunteers around the globe who have generously offered to translate WHO's COVID-19 learning materials into additional languages to reach as many people as possible.

The Introductory COVID-19 course in Indian Sign Language can be accessed here

Delivering knowledge to every frontline responder

Knowledge saves lives, even more so during outbreaks of novel diseases when one’s understanding of the emergency and the public health measures exercised in response develop frequently. During visits to health facilities, laboratories and community centres, the staff at World Health Organization (WHO) Kazakhstan are often told by frontline medical responders that there is a never-ending need for learning that can be practically exercised to save lives.

In Kazakhstan, the WHO team has capitalised on OpenWHO’s evidence-based courses, which provide frontline responders with life-saving knowledge on various topics relevant to COVID-19, all for free. To name a few, the courses on infection prevention and control, case management, and emergency operations centres provide critical information that healthcare workers need to keep themselves and others safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We support healthcare workers in Kazakhstan daily, travelling to the locations where cases are on the rise and providing on-site consultation to doctors and patients, as well as policymakers. OpenWHO is a great help to us to ensure that healthcare workers have the required theoretical basis to work during COVID-19 response,” stated Professor Bakhyt Kosherova from Karagandy Medical University.

To promote the OpenWHO courses, WHO Kazakhstan has established an operational partnership with Kazakhstan’s specialised governmental agency for post-graduate education, medical professional associations, medical universities, and alumni groups. In January 2021, the team conducted seven awareness sessions for a range of national stakeholders. Currently, OpenWHO courses are being promoted through professional networks, Ministry of Health webpages and agencies and influencers referenced in training curricula. OpenWHO’s most popular COVID-19 courses are being translated into Kazakh by WHO, which will ease incorporating the material into the training curriculum for Kazakh medical students and health workers.

“OpenWHO enrolments from Kazakhstan have increased six-fold since the WHO country office began promoting the platform in 2020. However, we aim for the ambitious objective of reaching every healthcare worker responding to COVID-19 in Kazakhstan, regardless of their role. There are OpenWHO courses for every level of healthcare proficiency. Together with my colleagues from the WHO Regional Office for Europe, located in Copenhagen, we trained more than 4,000 healthcare workers last year through online webinars. Now, we are excited to engage in OpenWHO, another valuable channel for learning, offering self-paced courses that healthcare workers can complete on their own and at a time convenient for them,” remarked Dr Vitalii Stetsyk, a member of the WHO country team in Kazakhstan.

Dr Stetsyk shared WHO Kazakhstan's experience reaching frontline learners during the first WHO #LearningSavesLives webinar, which was held on 19 February ahead of World Day of Social Justice. The webinar also included speakers from Somalia, Suriname and Tajikistan. The next session will explore the challenges women face learning in emergencies, marking International Women's Day on 8 March. Register here to join.

As of February 2021, OpenWHO offers 27 courses on COVID-19, available in 45 languages. To find free courses in your language, click here.

Testimonies from International Women's Day 2021 #LearningSavesLives Webinar

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically highlights the need of every frontline health worker- no matter how remote or isolated - to access life-saving knowledge and learning opportunities. As we look forward, reaching the light at the end of the tunnel for the COVID-19 pandemic, will require decisive efforts to ensure that existing inequities are effectively tackled – especially those faced by women. While women make up 70% of the global health and social care workforce, they are often underpaid or unpaid. And while their contribution is outsized, women constitute less than 25% of leadership roles in health, thus limiting their contributions to decision and policy making.

The statistics are of significance not only because a large percentage of women face ongoing discrimination or bias, but also because they are confronted by the greatest risks during health emergencies. This is not only wrong from the perspective of equity and human rights, but its continuation also negatively impacts outcomes from a social, economic and management perspective. During this webinar, the panelist, practitioners and keynote speakers #ChoseToChallenge the barriers women face to access lifesaving information training & learning.

Keynote speaker quotes:
“Women’s contribution to health is enormous, so it is time we need to step forward and reclaim our space, we need to claim the seat to the table. That really reminds me about this quote from a colleague Shirley who said “if they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring your folding chair”. So we really need a lot of folding chairs now so that women can really contribute to the decision-making and lead the COVID-19 response so we can also lead the recovery.” Savior Flomo Mendin, County Manager, Grand Bassa County, Last Mile Health, Liberia

“There has to be a place for women at every decision making table. Women are not only doers, they need to shape the environment in which we are moving forward.” Dr Gaya Gamhewage, Head of Learning & Capacity Development, Health Emergencies Programme, World Health Organization

“All of us can be leaders in this pandemic, but we need women & girls to be provided the opportunities to do so and to be listen to”, Dr Maria D Van Kerkhove, Technical Lead COVID-19, WHO Health Emergencies Programme

“We probably need to recognise that the problem has been recognised. But to understand that the problem has not been adressed...“, Dr Mike Ryan, Executive Director, WHO Health Emergencies Programme

According to a survey conducted in the first week of March 2021 among OpenWHO users, the top five challenges access to learning were Time (48%), Cost (45%), Digital access (24%), Not knowing where to access reliable source learning materials (24%), and language (19%). Female respondents were twice as likely to choose time and cost compared to male respondents.

The enabling factors were OpenWHO platform as easily accessible, with no cost, informative, simple and suitable for everyone. Also supervisor and colleague support of online learning was listed being helpful.

The COVID19 pandemic has increasingly brought more women to learn on the OpenWHO.org platform. Whereas prior the pandemic, about 70-80 % of learners in all courses were men, now the learner enrolment is equal between women and men.

Webinar replay: bit.ly/3qpMciv

Link to a short video with quotes: https://1drv.ms/v/s!Aub5xRpaC_E1kQi90FPnOGv5V3_t?e=3Kujcj

Monthly newsletter

You can access the most recent newsletter here. Please note that currently the newsletter is available in English only, but the newsletter highlights can be accessed in Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

New courses

We are pleased to announce the following courses which have recently become available on OpenWHO:

• Strengthening collaboration between human and animal health sectors for improved health security: This webinar-based course provides insight into some of WHO’s work at the animal-human-environment interface.

• Introduction to Infection Prevention and Control (IPC): Infection prevention and control (IPC) is an essential component of healthcare quality and patient safety. In this module you will learn how and why healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) occur and how IPC reduces their risk and spread.

New courses and languages for COVID-19

New courses launched for COVID-19

• COVID-19 and work: Staying healthy and safe at work during the COVID-19 pandemic: This course is intended to guide workers and their representatives, business leaders, managers, as well as occupational health and safety professionals in protecting their workplace during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• COVID-19 Infodemic management: Risk communication and community engagement challenges): The course covers key RCCE and then shows how they can be operationalized in the context of an extended outbreak that affects different populations with varied risk levels.

• Clinical management of patients with COVID-19 - Rehabilitation of patients with COVID-19: This course provides crucial knowledge on the rehabilitation needs of patients recovering from COVID-19, including patients with cognitive impairment, physical deconditioning and weakness, respiratory impairment, swallow impairment, communication impairment and challenges in completing activities of daily living.

• Leadership and programme management in Infection Prevention and Control (IPC): In this course, we will explore characteristics of a leader and different types of leadership, and how leadership skills are essential for effective communication and conflict management.

• Neglected tropical diseases in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: impact and guidance: This course provides a general introduction to the diseases, discusses the impact of COVID-19 on NTD programmes, and focuses on the adaptations needed to safely and effectively fight NTDs, in light of the disruption to health services caused by the pandemic.

New translations

The following 17 translations for COVID-19 have been launched this month:

• Clinical management of patients with COVID-19 in Albanian and Macedonian
  
• Hand Hygiene in Albanian, Macedonian and Tamil
  
• How to put on and remove personal protective equipment in Sinhala and Tamil
• Long-term care facilities in the context of COVID-19 Albanian and Macedonian
  
• Introduction to COVID-19 in Fulah, Latvian and Sinhala
  
• Injection Safety in Tetum
  
• Occupational Health and Safety in Swahili
  
• eProtect in Thai
  
• Environmental cleaning in Indonesian
• COVID-19 vaccination training for health workers in Indonesian

All courses for COVID-19 can be accessed here. You can use the toolbar to filter courses by language.

Updates to course content

The following course materials have been revised to reflect updates to the technical content and are now up to date:

• Introduction to COVID-19 in English Module 1. All other languages are currently being updated.

Complete list of COVID-19 learning resources

We are pleased to announce that OpenWHO now has 169 courses for COVID-19 spread across 45 languages and 27 topics. In summary, OpenWHO currently offers courses covering the following topics and languages to support the response to COVID-19:

• Introduction to COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Amharic, Bengali, Dari, Fulah, German, Hausa, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Indian Sign Language, Indonesian, Kurdish, Latvian, Macedonian, Marathi, Oriya, Oromo, Pashto, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Serbian, Sinhala, Somali, Swahili, Tetum, Turkish, Vietnamese, Urdu, Yoruba and Zulu)

• Clinical care SARI (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Tetum and Vietnamese)

• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Bengali, Indonesian, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Sinhala, Tetum, Thai and Vietnamese)

• IPC for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Bengali, Dutch, Farsi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Sinhala, Somali, Tetum, Turkish and Vietnamese)

• COVID-19 operational planning guidelines and partners platform to support country preparedness and response (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian and Portuguese)

• SARI treatment facility design (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Italian, Portugues, Tetum, and Vietnamese)

• An introduction to Go.Data (available in English, Spanish and Mongolian)

• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Dutch, Macedonian, Portuguese, Sinhala, Somali, Tamil, Tetum, Thai and Turkish)

• Standard precautions for hand hygiene (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Dutch, Macedonian, Portuguese, Sinhala, Somali, Tamil, Tetum and Turkish)

• Standard precautions for waste management (available in English and Tetum)

• Decontamination and sterilization of medical devices (available in English)

• Standard precautions for environmental cleaning and disinfection (available in English, Indonesian and Tetum)

• Standard precautions for injection safety and needle-stick injury management (available in English and Tetum)

• Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) core components and multimodal strategies (available in English)

• Basic microbiology (available in English)

• WHO COVID-19 Mass Gatherings Risk Assessment Training (available in English)

• Occupational health and safety for health workers in the context of COVID-19 (available in English, Spanish, Macedonian, Portuguese, and Swahili)

• Long-term care facilities in the context of COVID-19 (available in English, Albanian, Dutch, Macedonian, and Indonesian)

• Course 1: Clinical management of patients with COVID-19 - General considerations (available in English, Albanian, and Macedonian)

• Management and Facilitation of a Country COVID-19 Intra-Action Review (IAR) (available in English)

• COVID-19 vaccination training for health workers (available in English and Indonesian)

• Orientation to national deployment and vaccination planning for COVID-19 vaccines (available in English)

• Clinical management of patients with COVID-19 - Rehabilitation of patients with COVID-19 (available in English)

• Neglected tropical diseases in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: impact and guidance (available in English)

• Leadership and programme management in Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) (available in English)

• COVID-19 and work: Staying healthy and safe at work during the COVID-19 pandemic (available in English)

• COVID-19 Infodemic management: Risk communication and community engagement challenges (available in English)

To mark the coming International Women's Day on Monday 8 March, OpenWHO would like to explore the challenges women face with regard to learning in an emergency. We want to hear how women are using OpenWHO materials to reduce the gaps in access to health emergencies knowledge in their communities, organisations, and with peers. Help us to understand better the challenges women face by completing this short survey for International Women's Day here.

Best wishes,

OpenWHO team

Today we mark 1 year since we launched WHO’s first online learning course on COVID-19. Although we could not have known at the time, our quick action helped to get essential knowledge for managing the pandemic to frontline responders and decision-makers.

Back then, no one knew about the new virus, but our WHO experts helped the OpenWHO team to gather and adapt existing WHO evidence on the novel coronavirus (later named COVID-19) and guidance on managing severe acute respiratory pathogens into learning courses. Course production accelerated as the first WHO Emergency Committee meeting took place 22-23 January 2020 and, fulfilling the requirements of WHO’s Emergency Response Framework, the first learning resource was put together over the next 72 hours and launched on 26 January 2020. All this took place even before a Public Health Emergency of International Concern was declared on 30 January 2020.

Since then, the OpenWHO.org platform had grown to nearly 5 million learner registrations, mostly in our 25 free online COVID-19 courses in 44 languages. WHO’s technical-guidance-based first course “Introduction to COVID-19” is available on OpenWHO and the Pan American Health Organization’s Virtual Campus platform, and hosts more than 1.1 million total enrolments across 36 language versions. As new knowledge becomes available, course content is regularly updated. This is the first time in WHO’s history that we have been able to launch fast, high-quality, accessible learning on a massive scale to manage any health threat.

As the WHO Director-General has stated: OpenWHO is a powerful proof of concept for the WHO Academy and other future initiatives.

Lessons learnt

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant and rapid increase in all forms of digital learning. It has proven the power of online learning by using equity of access as a foundational principle for equity for all learners across the world to address knowledge and skills gaps. Online learning is no longer a temporary replacement, but a new way of working more efficiently and equitably. It is a basic part of the ecosystem needed to create a culture of lifelong learning in health. Below are some lessons learnt from the massive online learning delivery:

1. Accessibility – Online learning enables participants with even basic technology to access learning from almost anywhere in the world. It is cost effective, kinder to the environment and saves time and resources. Self-paced, low-bandwidth-adjusted, downloadable and portable learning available from any device and offline increases access.
   
2. Equity – Our massive open online courses (MOOCs) are available to all at no cost, democratizing knowledge and learning in a way never seen before. Providing equitable access to critical health emergency knowledge in the mother tongues of the most vulnerable populations is a core value of OpenWHO. The platform has published courses in a total of 46 languages so far, including 25 underserviced languages.
3. Flexibility – Self-paced mass online learning delivery enables individuals to learn at their own speed, at their preferred time and in their preferred place. It builds on and provides for the preferences and availability of the learner.
4. Learner-centricity – User-friendly options allow individuals to choose formats specific to their learning needs, and provide the basis for a more customized, ”just-in-time” learning experience and continuous, lifelong learning.
5. Quality – Courses that are based on WHO technical guidance and the use of adult learning techniques assure quality of content and enhance learning.

The WHO Academy has launched its first augmented reality course for health workers on the proper use of personal protective equipment (PPE). This short course is available on the Academy’s mobile learning app for all health workers globally.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the critical importance of health workers properly using their PPE to protect themselves and their patients.

Using their smartphones, learners can observe a lifelike, animated nurse - who appears through their screens to have joined them in their room or space - demonstrating the proper use of PPE.

The course is free and can be taken from a smartphone anywhere, anytime. It takes about 20 minutes to complete and is available in 7 languages - Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

New courses on COVID-19 vaccines

Working with WHO expert teams, OpenWHO launched the following courses to transfer critical knowledge on vaccination for the evolving COVID-19 pandemic:

• COVID-19 vaccination training for health workers: All health workers involved in implementation of COVID-19 vaccination need to have adequate knowledge and skills in order to ensure safe and efficient COVID-19 vaccine administration to specific priority groups as per country policy. This course provides general information on the disease and specific information on storage, handling and administration of the vaccine, recording and monitoring (including for adverse events following immunization (AEFI)), and communication (acceptance and demand) through a series of short video lectures and quizzes to test your knowledge. The course targets frontline health workers who will be vaccinators and also priority recipients.

• Orientation to national deployment and vaccination planning for COVID-19 vaccines: The Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator’s Country Readiness and Delivery workstream has released Guidance on developing a national deployment and vaccination plan (NDVP) for COVID-19 vaccines. This training package is intended to support national and sub-national focal points in preparing for COVID-19 vaccination. The training provides an overview of key aspects of the Guidance on developing a national deployment and vaccination plan for COVID-19 vaccines and highlights available and upcoming resources for COVID-19 vaccine introduction. Coming soon

New courses and languages for COVID-19

New courses launched

We are pleased to announce the following courses that have also recently become available on OpenWHO:

• Management and Facilitation of a Country COVID-19 Intra-Action Review (IAR): The Country COVID-19 Intra-Action Review (IAR) is a facilitated process that brings together COVID-19 responders from multiple sectors for experience sharing and collective learning, and it has been modelled after the WHO After Action Review (AAR) methodology. This course provides a general introduction to the management and the facilitation of an IAR during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

• The Public Health Emergency Operations Centre (PHEOC): Experience has shown that timely implementation of a PHEOC provides an essential platform for the management of public health emergencies and can help avoid common failings such as lack of clear leadership leading to delayed decision making, mismanagement of resources and poor coordination. This online course is designed as a companion to WHO’s Framework for a Public Health Emergency Operations Centre and is aimed at health emergency preparedness and response professionals, policy makers and partners seeking to implement and sustain Public Health Emergency Operations Centres.

New translations

The following 4 translations for COVID-19 have been launched this month:

• Hand Hygiene in Sinhala and Tetum
• Occupational Health and Safety in Spanish
• Waste Management in Tetum

All courses for COVID-19 can be accessed here. You can use the toolbar to filter courses by language.

Updates to course content

The following course materials have been revised to reflect updates to the technical content and are now up to date:

• Introduction to COVID-19 in English module 1. All other languages are currently being updated.
• Introduction to COVID-19 course in Indian Sign language: A new module customised for children with disabilities, particularly for those who are neurodiverse, was just adeed to this course. The materials can be found under Module 4: Materials for children with disabilities. The module covers how to wear a fabric/ medical mask, rules for handwashing, ways to dispose of used masks and the importance of maintaining appropriate physical distance.

Complete list of COVID-19 learning resources

We are pleased to announce that OpenWHO now has 147 courses for COVID-19 spread across 42 languages and 22 topics. In summary, OpenWHO currently offers courses covering the following topics and languages to support the response to COVID-19:

• Introduction to COVID-19: methods for detection, prevention, response and control (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Amharic, Bengali, Dari, German, Hausa, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Indian Sign Language, Indonesian, Kurdish, Macedonian, Marathi, Oriya, Oromo, Pashto, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Serbian, Somali, Swahili, Tetum, Turkish, Vietnamese, Urdu, Yoruba and Zulu)

• Clinical care SARI (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Tetum and Vietnamese)

• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Bengali, Indonesian, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Sinhala, Tetum and Vietnamese)

• IPC for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Bengali, Dutch, Farsi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Sinhala, Somali, Tetum, Turkish and Vietnamese)

• COVID-19 operational planning guidelines and partners platform to support country preparedness and response (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian and Portuguese)

• SARI treatment facility design (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tetum, and Vietnamese)

• An introduction to Go.Data (available in English, Spanish and Mongolian)

• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Dutch, Macedonian, Portuguese, Somali, Tetum, Thai and Turkish)

• Standard precautions for hand hygiene (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Sinhala, Somali, Tetum and Turkish)

• Standard precautions for waste management (available in English and Tetum)

• Decontamination and sterilization of medical devices (available in English)

• Standard precautions for environmental cleaning and disinfection (available in English and Tetum)

• Standard precautions for injection safety and needle-stick injury management (available in English)

• Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) core components and multimodal strategies (available English)

• Basic microbiology (available in English)

• WHO COVID-19 Mass Gatherings Risk Assessment Training (available in English)

• Occupational health and safety for health workers in the context of COVID-19 (available English, Macedonian, Portuguese and Spanish)

• Long-term care facilities in the context of COVID-19 (English, Dutch and Indonesian)

• Course 1: Clinical management of patients with COVID-19 - General considerations (English)

• COVID-19 vaccination training for health workers

• Management and Facilitation of a Country COVID-19 Intra-Action Review (IAR)

• Orientation to national deployment and vaccination planning for COVID-19 vaccines:

As 2020 draws to a close, the OpenWHO team would like to express our sincere thanks to each and every one of you for learning and growing with us during the COVID-19 pandemic. We know that #KnowledgeSavesLives – and that is especially true during emergencies. Please watch our one-minute video message here.

In the new year, we are committed to continuing to provide free access to expert knowledge to help you manage the pandemic and improve public health. We challenge each of you to help us spread the word about these free learning resources by bringing 20 people you know to the OpenWHO platform in 2021. Wishing you all a safe and healthy new year.

Best wishes,

OpenWHO team

We are thrilled to share our COVID-19 learning response work has been recognized internationally. Last night, the health emergencies learning platform OpenWHO.org powered by Hasso Plattner Institute solutions was awarded Gold Winner for the 'Best international digital transformation of a training programme in response to COVID-19' by the Learning Technologies Awards.

This Award belongs to us all, as the success is based on the strong collaborative work with all technical teams over the past years and in particular during the COVID-19 learning response this year.

Here is the citation from the Award: “The judges were impressed by the speed and scalability of OpenWHO, the dynamic learning environment created to lead and facilitate a worldwide frontline response to the pandemic now and in the future. Responding to evidence, OpenWHO is constantly updating vital information and functionality as well as aggregating data to create extra value by, for example, predicting and identifying hotspots. A hugely worthy gold winner.”

The weblink is: https://www.learningtechnologies.co.uk/the-class-of-2020

More than 350 private and public sector institutions participated, from 34 countries, and 61 judges screened nearly 500 entries. The OpenWHO team presented to the judges in September. Others shortlisted in our category included the British Council, Novartis, Open University of Hong Kong, University of Fort Hare and Metlife.

The OpenWHO team has also been honored to receive the following recognitions in the three years since its launch: Best Communication Paper Award at the International Conference on Informatics, Management and Technology in Health Care 2020; WHO Director-General's Award for Excellence 2018; Geneva Health Forum 2018 Jet d'Or prize; and Humanitarian Actor 2018 from Translators Without Borders.

Monthly newsletter

You can access the most recent newsletter here. Please note that currently, the newsletter is available in English only, but the newsletter highlights can be accessed in Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Certificates Guidelines page

The Certificate Guidelines page has recently been made available in Chinese. It is also available in English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish and can be found here.

Incident Management System (IMS) Tier 1 and 2 available in 6 languages

OpenWHO’s courses on the Incident Management System (IMS) – WHO's command system to control health emergencies – are now available in six languages: Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. The introductory course, IMS Tier 1, covers the minimum package for all personnel deployed in WHO emergency response, while the intermediate course, IMS Tier 2, builds on Tier 1 to provide a deeper understanding of the IMS. Additional languages such as Chinese are under development.

New channel on Clinical Management

Quality clinical care is at the heart of a robust, effective response to outbreaks. Frontline health workers need evidence-based tools and training to provide safe, effective and quality clinical care.The new Clinical Management channel includes training courses on a range of diseases, such as Ebola, diphtheria, influenza and others. The channel will also host a full course series on COVID-19 which covers a holistic pathway of care of a patient, from screening and triage to rehabilitation and palliative care. To access COVID-19-related clinical care courses in additional languages, you can visit the COVID-19 national languages channel.

New courses and languages for COVID-19

New courses launched

We are pleased to announce the following COVID-19 courses which have has recently become available on OpenWHO:

• Course 1: Clinical management of patients with COVID-19 - General considerations: The Clinical Management of Patients with COVID-19 course series is developed for healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The course provides crucial knowledge necessary to provide safe, effective quality patient care. This is the first in what will be a series of six courses. This course covers general considerations and gives background on the pandemic and discusses facility operations and preparation, referral systems and interfacility transfer, infection prevention and control, and the role for palliative care for patients. It also includes discussion of the ethical issues arising during COVID-19 care, including the principles of allocating critical care resources. Overall, this course addresses COVID-19 pandemic preparedness, at all levels of healthcare provision.
  

New translations

The following 7 translations for COVID-19 have been launched this month:

• Occupational health and safety for health workers in the context of COVID-19 in Macedonian and Portuguese
  
• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT in Polish and Sinhala
• Long-term care facilities in the context of COVID-19 in Dutch and Indonesian
• IPC for COVID-19 in Sinhala

All courses for COVID-19 can be accessed here. You can use the toolbar to filter courses by language.

Updates to course content

The following course materials have been revised to reflect updates to the technical content and are now up to date:

• WHO COVID-19 mass gatherings risk assessment training

Updates continue to progress for the following materials. We thank you for your patience and will notify you once the updates have been finalized:

• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses

Complete list of COVID-19 learning resources

We are pleased to announce that OpenWHO now has 140 courses for COVID-19 spread across 42 languages and 19 topics. In summary, OpenWHO currently offers courses covering the following topics and languages to support the response to COVID-19:

• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Amharic, Bengali, Dari, German, Hausa, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Indian Sign Language, Indonesian, Kurdish, Macedonian, Marathi, Oriya, Oromo, Pashto, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Serbian, Somali, Swahili, Tetum, Turkish, Vietnamese, Urdu, Yoruba and Zulu)

• Clinical care SARI (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Tetum and Vietnamese)

• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Bengali, Indonesian, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Sinhala, Tetum and Vietnamese)

• IPC for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Bengali, Dutch, Farsi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Sinhala, Somali, Tetum, Turkish and Vietnamese)

• COVID-19 operational planning guidelines and partners platform to support country preparedness and response (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian and Portuguese)

• SARI treatment facility design (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tetum, and Vietnamese)

• An introduction to Go.Data (available in English, Spanish and Mongolian)

• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Dutch, Macedonian, Portuguese, Somali, Tetum, Thai and Turkish)

• Standard precautions for hand hygiene (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Somali and Turkish)

• Standard precautions for waste management (available in English)

• Decontamination and sterilization of medical devices (available in English)

• Standard precautions for environmental cleaning and disinfection (available in English and Tetum)

• Standard precautions for injection safety and needle-stick injury management (available in English)

• Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) core components and multimodal strategies (available English)

• Basic microbiology (available in English)

• WHO COVID-19 Mass Gatherings Risk Assessment Training (available in English)

• Occupational health and safety for health workers in the context of COVID-19 (available English, Macedonian and Portuguese)

• Long-term care facilities in the context of COVID-19 (available in English, Dutch, and Indonesian)

• Course 1: Clinical management of patients with COVID-19 - General considerations (available in English)

Best wishes,

OpenWHO team

Monthly newsletter

You can access the most recent newsletter here. Please note that currently the newsletter is available in English only, but the newsletter highlights can be accessed in Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Updated materials for Ebola response

The OpenWHO team has been updating its Ebola courses in response to the latest outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The course "Introduction to Ebola" in Lingala has now been updated to reflect the latest technical guidance from WHO. All other languages versions of the course are currently up to date.

Healthy Ageing - Second course launched in September

We are pleased to announce that the Healthy Ageing for Impact in the 21st Century: Global Online Leaders Training kicked off a second run on the OpenWHO platform on 14 September and will continue through December.

In the 21st century, demographic shifts are making a significant impact on the structure of populations, bringing forth the phenomenon of an ageing population.

This programme will equip participants with the skills and competencies needed to work in the area of ageing, enabling participants to become the change agents that are needed to generate and drive action for the Decade of Healthy Ageing. If you are interested in participating in future rounds of the course, please visit the registration page and sign up using your professional email address.

Incident Management System (IMS) Tier 1 now available in new languages

To enhance the WHO Health Emergencies Programme's (WHE) deployment and response capability, WHE proposed the development of a series of training packages to build staff competencies, skills and knowledge. IMS Tier 1 covers the mandatory minimum package that all personnel being deployed on a WHO health emergency response must complete. This course recently became available in Russian. It is also available in Arabic, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.

New courses and languages for COVID-19

New courses launched

We are pleased to announce the following COVID-19 course which has recently become available on OpenWHO:

• Long-term care facilities in the context of COVID-19: The COVID-19 pandemic affects older people disproportionately, especially those living in long-term care facilities (LTCF) with significant impact on mortality and morbidity. Concerted action is needed to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 by enhancing infection prevention and control (IPC) measures within LTCF. The COVID-19 IPC course for LTCF consists of 4 training modules to be used in conjunction with the LTCF communication toolkit and preparedness checklist. This package is tailored for LTCF and based on WHO's in-depth technical guidance on IPC.

New translations

The following 5 translations for COVID-19 have been launched this month:

• Standard precautions for hand hygiene in Turkish
• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses in Marathi
• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 in Turkish
• Standard precautions: Environmental cleaning and disinfection in Tetum
• Introduction to Go.Data in Mongolian

All courses for COVID-19 can be accessed here. You can use the toolbar to filter courses by language.

Videos now available

Videos have recently been added to the following:

• Introduction to COVID-19 and how to wear fabric and medical masks: videos in Indian Sign Language. You can find the How to wear a medical mask and How to wear a fabric mask videos under module 3.

Updates to course content

The following course materials have been revised to reflect updates to the technical content and are now up to date:

• IPC for COVID-19 in Serbian. All other language versions are up to date.
  

Updates continue to progress for the following materials. We thank you for your patience and will notify you once the updates have been finalised:

• Clinical Management of COVID-19
• WHO COVID-19 mass gatherings risk assessment training

Complete list of COVID-19 learning resources

We are pleased to announce that OpenWHO now has 132 courses for COVID-19 spread across 41 languages and 18 topics. In summary, OpenWHO currently offers courses covering the following topics and languages to support the response to COVID-19:

• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Amharic, Bengali, Dari, German, Hausa, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Indian Sign Language, Indonesian, Kurdish, Macedonian, Marathi, Oriya, Oromo, Pashto, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Serbian, Somali, Swahili, Tetum, Turkish, Vietnamese, Urdu, Yoruba and Zulu)

• Clinical care SARI (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Tetum and Vietnamese)

• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Bengali, Indonesian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Tetum and Vietnamese)

• IPC for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Bengali, Dutch, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Somali, Tetum, Turkish and Vietnamese)

• COVID-19 operational planning guidelines and partners platform to support country preparedness and response (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian and Portuguese)

• SARI treatment facility design (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tetum, and Vietnamese)

• An introduction to Go.Data (available in English, Spanish and Mongolian)

• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Dutch, Macedonian, Portuguese, Somali, Tetum, Thai and Turkish)

• Standard precautions for hand hygiene (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Somali and Turkish)

• Standard precautions for waste management (available in English)

• Decontamination and sterilization of medical devices (available in English)

• Standard precautions for environmental cleaning and disinfection (available in English and Tetum)

• Standard precautions for injection safety and needle-stick injury management (available in English)

• Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) core components and multimodal strategies (available English)

• Basic microbiology (available in English)

• WHO COVID-19 Mass Gatherings Risk Assessment Training (available in English)

• Occupational health and safety for health workers in the context of COVID-19 (available English)

• Long-term care facilities in the context of COVID-19 (available in English)

NAM-HKU Fellowship in Global Health Leadership: Call for applications

The School of Public Health at The University of Hong Kong (HKU SPH) and the U.S. National Academy of Medicine (NAM) have partnered to offer a two-year training aimed at early to mid-career scholars from all over the world, with particular attention paid to scholars from the Asia-Pacific region. The NAM-HKU Fellowship in Global Health Leadership will initially run for three years, with one Fellow to be selected each year. The closing date for applications for the 2021/22 cohort is 30 November 2020. Please visit the HKU SPH website for further information: https://sph.hku.hk/en/nam-hkufellows

Best wishes,

OpenWHO team

Monthly newsletter

You can access the most recent newsletter here. Please note that currently the newsletter is available in English only, but the newsletter highlights can be accessed in Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

The FAQ page has recently been made available in Chinese. It is also available in English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish and can be found here.

New Certificates tab

The Certificates tab is now available and can be found in each course's navigation toolbar. The Certificates tab allows you to download the certificates you have achieved in the course. It also features a link to the Certificates Guidelines page, which provides information about the types of certificates available on OpenWHO and how to become eligible for one. The Certificates Guidelines page is available in English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, with Chinese coming soon. It can also be found here.

New courses

We are pleased to announce the following course which has recently become available on OpenWHO:

• Migration and Health: Enhancing Intercultural Competence and Diversity Sensitivity: Access to responsive, people-centred health systems is essential to ensure appropriate health care for refugees and migrants throughout the process of migration and settlement. Focusing on intercultural competence and diversity sensitivity, this course contributes to a broader WHO strategy to develop an evidence-based response to the public health needs of refugees and migrants.

New courses and languages for COVID-19

New courses launched for COVID-19

• Occupational health and safety for health workers in the context of COVID-19: All health workers require knowledge and skills to protect themselves and others from the occupational risks they encounter, so that they can work safely and effectively. This course covers four areas in response to these needs: infectious risks to health and safety, physical risks to health and safety, psychosocial risks to health and safety and basic occupational health and safety in health services.

New translations

The following 9 translations for COVID-19 have been launched this month:

• Standard precautions for hand hygiene in Somali
• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses in Pashto
• Clinical care SARI in Tetum
• IPC for COVID-19 in Bengali, Persian and Somali
• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 in Somali
• SARI treatment facility design in Tetum and Vietnamese

All courses for COVID-19 can be accessed here. You can use the toolbar to filter courses by language.

Videos now available

Videos have recently been added to the following:

• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT in English. You can find the How to wear a medical mask and How to wear a fabric mask videos under modules 4 and 5 respectively.
• WHO COVID-19 mass gatherings risk assessment training in English. Please note: The materials used in this course are currently being revised to reflect updates to the technical content. All course participants will be notified once these updates have been made.

Updates to course content

The following course materials have been revised to reflect updates to the technical content and are now up to date:

• IPC for COVID-19 in Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Vietnamese. Serbian to follow.
• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses in Persian. All other language versions are up to date.

Updates continue to progress for the following materials. We thank you for your patience and will notify you once the updates have been finalised:

• Clinical Management of COVID-19
• WHO COVID-19 mass gatherings risk assessment training

Complete list of COVID-19 learning resources

We are pleased to announce that OpenWHO now has 126 courses for COVID-19 spread across 39 languages and 17 topics. In summary, OpenWHO currently offers courses covering the following topics and languages to support the response to COVID-19:

• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Amharic, Bengali, Dari, German, Hausa, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Indian Sign Language, Indonesian, Kurdish, Macedonian, Oriya, Oromo, Pashto, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Serbian, Somali, Swahili, Tetum, Turkish, Vietnamese, Urdu, Yoruba and Zulu)
• Clinical care SARI (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Tetum and Vietnamese)
• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Bengali, Indonesian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Tetum and Vietnamese)
• IPC for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Bengali, Dutch, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Somali, Tetum, Turkish and Vietnamese)
• COVID-19 operational planning guidelines and partners platform to support country preparedness and response (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian and Portuguese)
• SARI treatment facility design (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tetum and Vietnamese)
• An introduction to Go.Data (available in English and Spanish)
• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Dutch, Macedonian, Portuguese, Somali, Tetum and Thai)
• Standard precautions for hand hygiene (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and Somali)
• Standard precautions for waste management (available in English)
• Decontamination and sterilization of medical devices (available in English)
• Standard precautions for environmental cleaning and disinfection (available in English)
• Standard precautions for injection safety and needle-stick injury management (available in English)
• Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) core components and multimodal strategies (available in English)
• WHO COVID-19 mass gatherings risk assessment training (available in English)
• Basic microbiology (available in English)
• Occupational health and safety for health workers in the context of COVID-19 (available in English)

Best wishes,

OpenWHO team

In recognition of World Mask Week, which runs from 7 to 14 August, the OpenWHO team would like to highlight its courses that illustrate how to safely wear a mask in the context of COVID-19.

The course Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT in English features video demonstrations that show how to put on and take off medical (Module 4) or fabric masks (Module 5). Those who prefer to access the videos in Indian Sign Language may do so here (Modules 2 and 3).

Masks alone will not stop the virus — we must do it all:

• Wear a mask that covers your nose, mouth and chin
• Keep physical distance
• Clean your hands
• Keep away from big crowds
• Cover your mouth and nose when coughing

Last week, the Director-General of WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced the #WearAMask challenge, which encourages the public to take a photo or a video of themselves wearing a mask, share it on social media and nominate friends to do the same. Dr Tedros noted "As well as being one of the key tools to stop the virus, the mask has come to represent solidarity...By wearing a mask, you’re sending a powerful message to those around you that we are all in this together."

Monthly newsletter

You can access the most recent newsletter here. Please note that currently the newsletter is available in English only, but the newsletter highlights can be accessed in Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

The FAQ page is now available in English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish and can be found here. Chinese to follow.

Channel descriptions

A short description of each channel is now available in Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Channels can be accessed by clicking on the "Channels" drop-down menu button that is located at the top of the OpenWHO homepage, between the "Home" and "Courses" buttons.

New courses and languages for COVID-19

New courses launched

We are pleased to announce the following COVID-19 courses which have recently become available on OpenWHO:

• Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) core components and multimodal strategies: In this introductory course you will learn the essential components of effective IPC programmes, including multimodal strategies for implementation, at the national and facility level, according to scientific evidence and the advice of WHO and international experts.
• WHO COVID-19 Mass Gatherings Risk Assessment Training: The purpose of this course is to provide guidance for health authorities and organizers of mass gatherings in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the specific aim of containing risks associated with transmission of this infection.
• Basic microbiology: In this course, you will learn about how disease-causing microbes, called pathogens, are classified, identified and transmitted. You will be introduced to basic microbiological principles, fundamental laboratory diagnostics and mechanisms by which microbes transmit and cause diseases.

New translations

The following 10 translations for COVID-19 have been launched this month:

• Standard precautions for hand hygiene in Chinese, Spanish and Dutch
• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses in Dari, Kurdish, Oromo and Somali
• IPC for COVID-19 in Dutch and Tetum
• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 in Russian

All courses for COVID-19 can be accessed here. You can use the toolbar to filter courses by language.

Videos now available

Videos have recently been added to the following:

• COVID-19 operational planning guidelines and partners platform to support country preparedness and response in Arabic
• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT in Arabic and Spanish
• How to wear fabric and medical masks in Indian Sign Language

Updates to course content

The following course materials have been revised to reflect updates to the technical content and are now up to date:

• IPC for COVID-19 in Arabic, French, Russian, Indonesian, Macedonian, Portuguese and Turkish. In addition, the videos in the English course have now been updated using the latest slides. Bengali and Serbian to follow shortly. All other languages are currently being updated.
• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses in Urdu. Persian to follow. All other language versions are up to date.

Updates continue to progress for the following materials. We thank you for your patience and will notify you once the updates have been finalised:

• Clinical Management of COVID-19

Complete list of COVID-19 learning resources

We are pleased to announce that OpenWHO now has 116 courses for COVID-19 spread across 38 languages and 16 topics. In summary, OpenWHO currently offers courses covering the following topics and languages to support the response to COVID-19:

• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Amharic, Bengali, Dari, German, Hausa, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Indian Sign Language, Indonesian, Kurdish, Macedonian, Oriya, Oromo, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Serbian, Somali, Swahili, Tetum, Turkish, Vietnamese, Urdu, Yoruba and Zulu)
• Clinical care SARI (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Portuguese and Vietnamese)
• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Bengali, Indonesian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Tetum and Vietnamese)
• IPC for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Tetum, Turkish and Vietnamese)
• COVID-19 operational planning guidelines and partners platform to support country preparedness and response (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian and Portuguese)
• SARI treatment facility design (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish)
• An introduction to Go.Data (available in English and Spanish)
• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Dutch, Macedonian, Portuguese, Tetum and Thai)
• Standard precautions for hand hygiene (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese)
• Standard precautions for waste management (available in English)
• Decontamination and sterilization of medical devices (available in English)
• Standard precautions for environmental cleaning and disinfection (available in English)
• Standard precautions for injection safety and needle-stick injury management (available in English)
• Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) core components and multimodal strategies (available in English)
• WHO COVID-19 Mass Gatherings Risk Assessment Training (available in English)
• Basic microbiology (available in English)

Best wishes,

OpenWHO team

Monthly newsletter

The newsletter for June 2020 has been released. You can access it here. Please note that currently the newsletter is available in English only, but the newsletter highlights can be accessed in Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Updated materials for Ebola response

OpenWHO has been working to update its Ebola courses and make them more accessible in response to the latest outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. An introductory series is available in English, French, Lingala and Swahili and is currently being updated in collaboration with WHO technical experts to reflect the latest guidance. These modules were previously available in the Ebola knowledge resources pack. Additional resources have also been made available as individual courses for improved accessibility, including the Ebola GO 2.0 training in French and the Ebola clinical management course in Swahili.

Extended deadline – WHO Academy learning strategy process: a call for ideas

The World Health Organization invites you to contribute your Big Idea to shape the future of training and learning in achieving better health for all. The submission form is available in English, French and Spanish. Just click on the relevant link below, select your language at the top of the page and submit your idea or approach in 500 words or less. Deadline for submissions extended until 10 July.

Share your Big Idea here.

New option available for professional affiliation in OpenWHO profile

OpenWHO users can now select ‘Medical or health professional, such as a clinician, nurse, midwife or pharmacist’ in response to the question ‘What is your professional affiliation?’ in their personal profile. Please note that, if suitable, you may return to your profile and change your current selection.

New courses and languages for COVID-19

Last week, the 100th course for COVID-19 was launched on OpenWHO. The 100th course (a general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses in Yoruba) was published on 26 June, exactly 5 months after the launch of the first COVID-19 course on the platform.

New course launched

We are pleased to announce the following COVID-19 course which has recently become available on OpenWHO:

• Standard precautions: Injection safety and needle-stick injury management: In this course, you will learn about the causes of unsafe injection practices, how to safely give injections, and how to safely dispose of needles and other sharps. You will also learn what to do when needle-stick injuries occur, how to manage potential exposures, and ways to protect yourself, the staff and patients in your facility, and your community.

New translations

The following 12 courses for COVID-19 have been launched this month:

• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses in Igbo, Punjabi, Yoruba and Zulu.
• Standard precautions for hand hygiene in Arabic and Russian.
• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 in Chinese, Dutch, Tetum and Spanish.
• Clinical care SARI in Arabic.
• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT in Tetum.

All courses for COVID-19 can be accessed here. You can use the toolbar to filter courses by language.

Certificates now available

Participants can now gain a Confirmation of Participation if they complete 100% of the course material in the Introduction to COVID-19 video in Indian Sign Language course.

In addition, the quiz rules in the following courses have been changed to allow for unlimited attempts on the assessments:

• Standard precautions for hand hygiene
• Standard precautions for waste management
• Decontamination and sterilization of medical devices
• Standard precautions for environmental cleaning and disinfection

Videos now available

Videos have recently been added to the following courses:

• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses in Chinese.
• SARI treatment facility design in Arabic.

Updates to course content

The following course materials have been revised to reflect updates to the technical content and are now up to date:

• Modules B1, B2 and D of the general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses in French and Portuguese. Persian and Urdu to follow. All other language versions were updated in May.
• IPC for COVID-19 in English. All translations to follow.

Updates continue to progress for the following course. We thank you for your patience and will notify you once the updates have been finalised:

• Clinical care SARI

Complete list of COVID-19 learning resources

We are pleased to announce that OpenWHO now has 103 resources for COVID-19 spread across 34 languages and 13 topics. In summary, OpenWHO currently offers courses covering the following topics and languages to support the response to COVID-19:

• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Amharic, Bengali, German, Hausa, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Indian Sign Language, Indonesian, Macedonian, Oriya, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Serbian, Swahili, Tetum, Turkish, Vietnamese, Urdu, Yoruba and Zulu);
• Clinical care SARI (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Portuguese and Vietnamese);
• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Bengali, Indonesian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Tetum and Vietnamese);
• IPC for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Turkish and Vietnamese);
• COVID-19 operational planning guidelines and partners platform to support country preparedness and response (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian and Portuguese);
• SARI treatment facility design (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish);
• An introduction to Go.Data (available in English and Spanish);
• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese English, French, Spanish, Albanian, Dutch, Macedonian, Portuguese, Tetum and Thai);
• Standard precautions for hand hygiene (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian and Portuguese);
• Standard precautions for waste management (available in English);
• Decontamination and sterilization of medical devices (available in English);
• Standard precautions for environmental cleaning and disinfection (available in English); and
• Standard precautions for injection safety and needle-stick injury management (available in English).

Best wishes,

OpenWHO team

OpenWHO launched its 100th course to support the response to coronavirus disease on 26 June, exactly 5 months after launching its first COVID-19 course.

This milestone course provides an introduction to COVID-19 in Yoruba. The introductory course is also under development in Punjabi, Zulu, Igbo, Somali and Oromo.

OpenWHO knows from experience and research that people prefer information in their own language. That's why the free learning platform has prioritized the translation of COVID-19 courses not only into the 6 official UN languages, but also into diverse national languages spoken across the globe, to help localize the response.

In total, OpenWHO offers courses on 13 different COVID-19 topics across 31 languages. The platform has nearly 3.7 million course enrolments, with new users joining every day.

OpenWHO hosts a growing series of courses addressing infection prevention and control (IPC) topics on the platform’s COVID-19 learning channel.

The WHO IPC team partnered with OpenWHO to adapt existing learning materials for the OpenWHO platform to reach a broader audience, strengthening IPC in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

An injection safety course was launched 23 June. Other courses cover hand hygiene (now in 4 languages), waste management, decontamination of medical devices and environmental cleaning.

There are 305 000 total course enrolments in the series and 169 000 certificates have been issued. The next course will focus on IPC core components and multimodal strategies.

OpenWHO also hosts courses tailored specifically to the COVID-19 response that provide an overview of IPC and explain how to put on and remove personal protective equipment.

WHO Academy learning strategy process: a call for ideas

The World Health Organization invites you to contribute your Big Idea to shape the future of training and learning in achieving better health for all.

The submission form is available in English, French and Spanish. Just click on the relevant link below, select your language at the top of the page and submit your idea or approach in 500 words or less. Deadline for submissions extended until 30 June.

Share your Big Idea here.

Now Available for Health Workers: The WHO Academy’s COVID-19 Mobile Learning App

The WHO Academy’s mobile learning app was developed specifically for health workers and is designed to enable them to expand their life-saving skills to battle COVID-19.

With content in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, the app delivers access to a wealth of COVID-19 knowledge resources developed by WHO, including up-to-the-minute guidance, tools, training, and virtual workshops to support health workers in caring for afflicted patients and in protecting themselves as they do their critical work.

The app can be found via a direct link to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store or by searching “WHO Academy” in the stores.

New courses and languages for COVID-19

We are pleased to announce the following two new courses which have recently become available on OpenWHO:

• Decontamination and sterilization of medical devices: The processes of sterilization and decontamination are complex, requiring specific infrastructure, equipment and process. In this course, which is divided into two parts, you will learn about the overall procedure for managing decontamination and sterilization of medical devices.
• Standard precautions: Environmental cleaning and disinfection: In this course, you will learn the role of an IPC professional in environmental cleaning and understand how cleaning and disinfection prevent contamination of the health care environment.

New translations for COVID-19

The following 10 courses for COVID-19 have been launched recently:

• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT in Albanian, Bengali and Macedonian.
• Standard precautions for hand hygiene in French
• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses in German and Tetum
• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 in French, Portuguese and Thai
• Standard precautions for hand hygiene in Portuguese

All courses for COVID-19 can be accessed here. You can use the toolbar to filter courses by language.

Certificates now available

Participants can now gain a Record of Achievement if they score 80% or higher on the assessments in the following courses:

• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT in Russian, Spanish and Bengali.
• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses in Bengali and Persian.

Videos now available

Videos have recently been added to the following courses:

• Country preparedness and response course in French.
• SARI treatment facility design in Italian and Portuguese.

Updates to course content

The following course materials have been revised to reflect updates to the technical content and are now up to date:

• Modules B1, B2 and D of the general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses, in Arabic, Chinese, English, Spanish, Russian, Amharic, Bengali, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Macedonian, Oriya, Serbian, Swahili, Turkish and Vietnamese. French, Hausa, Persian, Portuguese and Urdu to follow.
• IPC for COVID-19 in English. All translations to follow.

Updated video: COVID-19 Explained (June 2020)

Click here to watch an updated video that offers a quick look at what is currently known about COVID-19.

Complete list of COVID-19 learning resources

We are pleased to announce that OpenWHO now has 90 resources for COVID-19 spread across 29 languages and 12 topics. In summary, OpenWHO currently offers courses covering the following topics and languages to support the response to COVID-19:

• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Amharic, Bengali, German, Hausa, Hindi, Hungarian, Indian Sign Language, Indonesian, Macedonian, Oriya, Persian, Portuguese, Serbian, Swahili, Tetum, Turkish, Vietnamese and Urdu);
• Clinical care SARI (available in English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Portuguese and Vietnamese);
• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Bengali, Indonesian, Macedonian, Portuguese and Vietnamese);
• IPC for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Turkish and Vietnamese);
• COVID-19 operational planning guidelines and partners platform to support country preparedness and response (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian and Portuguese);
• SARI treatment facility design (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish);
• An introduction to Go.Data (available in English and Spanish);
• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, English, French, Albanian, Macedonian, Portuguese and Thai);
• Standard precautions for hand hygiene (available in English, French and Portuguese);
• Standard precautions for waste management (available in English and coming soon in additional languages);
• Decontamination and sterilization of medical devices (available in English and coming soon in additional languages); and
• Standard precautions for environmental cleaning and disinfection (available in English and coming soon in additional languages).

Monthly newsletter

The OpenWHO newsletter for May 2020 has been released. You can access it here.

Best wishes,

OpenWHO team

The World Health Organization invites you to contribute your Big Idea to shape the future of training and learning in achieving better health for all.

The WHO Academy, a lifelong learning centre scheduled to launch next year, is working to scale up learning for impact through digital and face-to-face courses, reaching millions of health workers and others worldwide through the latest technologies and advancements in learning science.

As a key part of this effort, we are working with experts and practitioners to develop a global learning strategy that will shape the future of WHO’s approach to training and learning for achieving health goals and the health-related Sustainable Development Goals.

As part of a broader consultation process with experts in health, learning and education, and digital technologies, we would now like to invite everyone with an interest in this topic to join in this endeavor by contributing their ideas to the WHO’s learning strategy.

Accordingly, we have established a Call for Ideas so that anyone can share their Big Idea on how to enhance the quality and impact of training and lifelong learning approaches in health.

The submission form is available in English, French and Spanish. Just click on the relevant link below, select your language at the top of the page and submit your idea or approach in 500 words or less.

Share your Big Idea here.

We will use the responses we receive to develop WHO’s global learning strategy to ensure that all who are involved in the world’s health and social-care systems have ample opportunities to strengthen the competencies they need to save lives and improve health outcomes in their communities.

The deadline for submissions has been extended to 10 July.

The WHO Academy’s mobile learning app was developed specifically for health workers and is designed to enable them to expand their life-saving skills to battle COVID-19.

With content in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, the app delivers access to a wealth of COVID-19 knowledge resources developed by WHO, including up-to-the-minute guidance, tools, training, and virtual workshops to support health workers in caring for afflicted patients and in protecting themselves as they do their critical work.

The app can be found via direct link to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store or by searching “WHO Academy” in the stores.

The World Health Organization invites you to contribute your Big Idea to shape the future of training and learning in achieving better health for all.

The WHO Academy, a lifelong learning centre scheduled to launch next year, is working to scale up learning for impact through digital and face-to-face courses, reaching millions of health workers and others worldwide through the latest technologies and advancements in learning science.

As a key part of this effort, we are working with experts and practitioners to develop a global learning strategy that will shape the future of WHO’s approach to training and learning for achieving health goals and the health-related Sustainable Development Goals.

As part of a broader consultation process with experts in health, learning and education, and digital technologies, we would now like to invite everyone with an interest in this topic to join in this endeavor by contributing their ideas to the WHO’s learning strategy.

Accordingly, we have established a Call for Ideas so that anyone can share their Big Idea on how to enhance the quality and impact of training and lifelong learning approaches in health.

The submission form is available in English, French and Spanish. Just click on the relevant link below, select your language at the top of the page and submit your idea or approach in 500 words or less.

Share your Big Idea here.

We will use the responses we receive to develop WHO’s global learning strategy to ensure that all who are involved in the world’s health and social-care systems have ample opportunities to strengthen the competencies they need to save lives and improve health outcomes in their communities.

The closing date for the first round of ideas is 8th June 2020.

New courses for COVID-19 available

The following resources for COVID-19 have been launched this week:

• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 in Albanian and Macedonian
• SARI treatment facility design in French
• Clinical care SARI in Macedonian
• Country preparedness and response in Spanish
• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT in Vietnamese

New certificates available

Participants can now gain a Record of Achievement if they score 80% or higher on the assessments in the following courses:

• Introduction to COVID-19 and emerging respiratory viruses in Spanish, Hindi, Hungarian, Macedonian, Serbian and Turkish.

Videos now available

Videos have recently been added to the country preparedness and response course in Russian. More languages to follow.

Updates to course content

Please note that the following courses are currently being revised to reflect updates to the technical content. You will be notified once the updated materials are available:

• IPC for COVID-19
• Clinical care SARI

In addition, modules B1, B2 and D of the general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses, have been recently updated and the updates are currently being rolled-out across all language versions of the course. You will be kept up to date as this process progresses.

Complete list of COVID-19 learning resources

We are pleased to announce that OpenWHO now has 78 resources for COVID-19 spread across 26 languages. In summary, OpenWHO currently offers courses covering the following topics and languages to support the response to COVID-19:

• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Amharic, Bengali, Hausa, Hindi, Hungarian, Indian Sign Language, Indonesian, Macedonian, Odia, Persian, Portuguese, Serbian, Swahili, Turkish, Vietnamese and Urdu);
• Clinical care SARI (available in English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Portuguese and Vietnamese);
• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Portuguese and Vietnamese);
• IPC for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Turkish and Vietnamese);
• COVID-19 operational planning guidelines and partners platform to support country preparedness and response (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian and Portuguese);
• SARI treatment facility design (available in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish);
• An introduction to Go.Data (available in English and Spanish);
• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, English, Albanian and Macedonian);
• Standard precautions for hand hygiene (available in English and coming soon in additional languages); and
• Standard precautions for waste management (available in English and coming soon in additional languages).

Best wishes,

OpenWHO team

In February, OpenWHO released a short animated video that explains 6 ways a person can protect themselves and others from COVID-19:

1. Wash hands regularly using soap and water or an alcohol rub if hands are not visibly dirty.
2. Practice respiratory hygiene by covering your nose and mouth when coughing or sneezing, using a flexed elbow or tissue. Throw the tissue into a closed bin afterwards and wash your hands.
3. Maintain social distancing - at least 1 metre (3 feet).
4. Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth.
5. Use masks and personal protective equipment if you are sick, when caring for someone who is sick or in a healthcare setting.
6. Stay home if you are unwell, but if you have a fever, cough and difficulty breathing, seek medical care.

You can watch the video and enrol in the eProtect course for respiratory infections here. The course is also available in the following languages: français, Bahasa Indonesia, русский, Português, 中文, Español, العربية and Tiếng Việt.

The complete list of OpenWHO's resources for COVID-19 can be found here.

We are pleased to announce three new courses which have recently become available on OpenWHO:

• Standard precautions: Waste management: In this course, you will learn about the different categories of waste and the process for waste management. Health care waste includes all waste generated by health, research and laboratory facilities in the course of providing health care services. Health care waste in a facility should be managed from the point of generation to final disposal and removal.
• Tobacco product regulation: Basic handbook: Although tobacco use is a major public health problem, tobacco products are one of the few openly available consumer products that are virtually unregulated in many countries for contents, emissions and design features. In this three-part series, you will first review the basics of tobacco product regulation and international guidance (Sections 1-2), steps to assessing regulatory needs and capacity and regulatory considerations (Sections 3-4), and finally, implementation and potential challenges, novel, new and modified tobacco or related products, and testing and disclosure (Sections 5-7).
• Tobacco product regulation: Building laboratory testing capacity: In recent years, health authorities have become increasingly interested in the potential of tobacco product regulation to reduce the morbidity and mortality associated with tobacco use. This course provides practical, stepwise approaches to implementing tobacco testing to improve tobacco product regulation. Such guidance is relevant to a wide range of countries in various settings, even those with inadequate resources to establish a testing facility.

COVID-19 resources now available in 25 languages!

OpenWHO now has a total of 72 resources for COVID-19 spread across 25 languages, the newest being Amharic, Hausa, Odia and Swahili. Since last Thursday the 7th, 9 new language versions have been added:

• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses in Amharic, Hausa, Odia and Swahili
• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 in Arabic
• SARI treatment facility design in Indonesian and Spanish
• An introduction to Go.Data in Spanish
• IPC for COVID-19 in Vietnamese

Complete list of COVID-19 learning resources

In summary, OpenWHO currently offers courses covering the following topics and languages to support the response to COVID-19:

• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Amharic, Bengali, Hausa, Hindi, Hungarian, Indian Sign Language, Indonesian, Macedonian, Odia, Persian, Portuguese, Serbian, Swahili, Turkish, Vietnamese and Urdu);
• Clinical care SARI (available in English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Portuguese and Vietnamese);
• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian and Portuguese);
• IPC for COVID-19 (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Turkish and Vietnamese);
• COVID-19 operational planning guidelines and partners platform to support country preparedness and response (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Indonesian and Portuguese);
• SARI treatment facility design (available in Arabic, English, Russian, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish);
• An introduction to Go.Data (available in English and Spanish);
• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 (available in Arabic and English);
• Standard precautions for hand hygiene (available in English and coming soon in additional languages); and
• Standard precautions for waste management (available in English and coming soon in additional languages).

Best wishes,

OpenWHO team

The WHO ‘No Tobacco’ Unit (TFI) of the Health Promotion Department is pleased to announce the launch of two online courses on tobacco product regulation on OpenWHO. Tobacco Product Regulation in simple terms, is what goes into the product and what comes out during use, which in technical terms are referred to as the contents (in) and emissions (out) of tobacco products.

Tobacco products kill half of its users, so regulation of these products is of critical importance to reduce the demand for tobacco and protect public health, especially young people.

The online courses provide practical guidance on tobacco product regulation and will be useful to a wide range of audiences, including policymakers, regulators, health authorities, tobacco control advocates, researchers and anyone interested in tobacco product regulation. Further, the courses provide clear guidance on tobacco product regulation in line with Articles 9 and 10 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. The teaser video, which elegantly introduces the courses, is available for viewing here.

The courses are based on WHO’s tobacco product regulation handbooks, The Basics of Tobacco Product Regulation and Building Laboratory Testing Capacity and further information on the courses is provided below:

• Course 1, on the Basics of Tobacco Product Regulation, is a basic reference document for regulators/health authorities in any country and other interested parties seeking to monitor, evaluate and regulate tobacco products. It is delivered by Dr Ghazi Zaatari, Chair of the WHO Study Group on Tobacco Product Regulation and will take approximately 3 hours to complete.
• Course 2, on Building Laboratory Testing Capacity, provides practical, stepwise approaches to implementing tobacco testing and comprehensible information on how to test tobacco products, what products to test, and how to use testing data in a meaningful way to support regulation. It also provides a step-by-step guide to developing a testing laboratory, using an existing internal laboratory, contracting an external laboratory, and making use of the available support mechanisms both within WHO and externally. The course is delivered by Dr Nuan Ping Cheah, Chair of the WHO Tobacco Laboratory Network and will take approximately 2 hours to complete.

Both courses are a call to countries to prioritize and commit resources to strengthen tobacco regulation capacity. Failure to regulate tobacco products represents a missed opportunity, as tobacco product regulation is a valuable tool that complements other tried and tested tobacco control interventions, as part of a comprehensive tobacco control programme.

A certificate of achievement is issued for each course to those who have completed the materials and earned at least 80% of the maximum number of points from all graded assignments.

We hope you will find these resources useful. Further guidance is available across the three levels of WHO. Please do not hesitate to contact us should you require further information, technical advice or have questions.

In its efforts to support the essential work of frontline responders, OpenWHO has published several courses on different Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) topics.

More than a month before the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, OpenWHO launched the introductory course Emerging respiratory viruses, including COVID-19: methods for detection, prevention, response and control which included a module with IPC guidance. Clinical Care Severe Acute Respiratory Infection and ePROTECT Respiratory Infections soon followed with more detailed technical guidance. OpenWHO then published a compilation of IPC resources in the course Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) for Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). To reach as many learners as possible, OpenWHO translated these course materials into the official UN languages and a range of national languages.

Since the declaration of the pandemic, OpenWHO has continued to provide learners with the most up-to-date WHO IPC guidance through actively revising current courses and adding a video guide on COVID-19: How to put on and remove personal protective equipment (PPE), as well as two Standard precaution modules on Hand hygiene and Waste management.

In addition to IPC resources, OpenWHO also continues to support training needs on other health topics, offering two new courses on Tobacco product regulation: Basic handbook and Building laboratory testing capacity, as well as on Drug-resistant tuberculosis: how to interpret rapid molecular test results.

With more than 2.5 million course enrolments, OpenWHO strives to expand access to essential WHO guidance in countries around the world.

The Journal of Medical Internet Research published a peer-reviewed article authored by the OpenWHO team: Global Reach of an Online COVID-19 Course in Multiple Languages on OpenWHO in the First Quarter of 2020: Analysis of Platform Use Data.

The aim of the paper was to investigate the geographic reach of different language courses accessed by a worldwide audience seeking information on COVID-19. It concluded that the online resources addressed a worldwide learning need by providing WHO’s technical guidance packaged in simple formats for access and use.

In a speech on 15 April, Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus emphasized WHO's commitment to training millions to fight the pandemic using OpenWHO:

"WHO is getting on with the job.

We are continuing to study this virus every moment of every day, we are learning from many countries about what works, and we are sharing that information with the world.

There are more than 1.5 million enrolments in WHO’s online courses through OpenWHO.org, and we will continue to expand this platform to train many more millions so we can fight COVID effectively.

Today we launched a new course for health workers on how to put on and remove personal protective equipment.

Every day we bring together thousands of clinicians, epidemiologists, educators, researchers, lab technicians, infection prevention specialists and others to exchange knowledge on COVID-19."

We are pleased to announce three new courses which have recently become available on OpenWHO:

• Flutool Plus - using the WHO Seasonal Influenza Immunisation Costing Tool: The aim of this course is to promote the dissemination and use of Flutool Plus, the WHO tool designed to help lower- and middle-income countries in the process of costing of Seasonal Influenza Immunisation Programs.
• Standard precautions: Hand hygiene: This course has been prepared to help summarize the WHO guidelines on hand hygiene, associated tools and ideas for effective implementation.
• Drug-resistant tuberculosis: how to interpret rapid molecular test results: This training toolkit by the European Laboratory Initiative for TB, HIV and Viral Hepatitis provides a unique combination of practical guidance and expert advice on the interpretation of selected WHO-endorsed tests for drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB).

COVID-19 resources available in more languages

The platform now has a total of 61 resources for COVID-19 spread across 21 languages, the newest being Bengali, Polish and Urdu, with many more in the pipeline. The most recent translations include:

• ePROTECT Respiratory Infections in Arabic
• Country preparedness and response in Arabic
• Introduction to COVID-19 and emerging respiratory viruses in Bengali
• SARI Treatment Facility Design in Italian
• IPC for COVID-19 in Polish
• SARI Treatment Facility Design in Russian
• Introduction to COVID-19 and emerging respiratory viruses in Urdu

New certificates available

Participants can now gain a Record of Achievement if they score 80% or higher on the assessments in the following courses:

• ePROTECT Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian and Portuguese. Russian and Spanish to follow.
• Introduction to COVID-19 and emerging respiratory viruses in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese and Russian. More languages to follow.

Complete list of COVID-19 learning resources

In summary, OpenWHO currently offers courses covering the following topics and languages to support the response to COVID-19:

• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses (available in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Hindi, Hungarian, Indian Sign Language, Indonesian, Macedonian, Persian, Portuguese, Serbian, Turkish, Vietnamese and Urdu);
• Clinical care SARI (available in English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Portuguese and Vietnamese);
• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian and Portuguese);
• IPC for COVID-19 (available in Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian and Turkish);
• COVID-19 operational planning guidelines and partners platform to support country preparedness and response (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, Russian and Portuguese);
• SARI treatment facility design (available in Arabic, English, Italian, Portuguese and Russian);
• An introduction to Go.Data (available in English and coming soon in additional languages);
• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 (available in English and coming soon in additional languages); and
• Standard precautions for hand hygiene (available in English and coming soon in additional languages).

Best wishes,

OpenWHO team

We are pleased to announce that a new free course on the interpretation of results of selected WHO-endorsed rapid molecular tests for drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) is available on OpenWHO. You can access the course through the following link: https://openwho.org/courses/multi-drug-resistant-tb.

Addressing DR-TB is a global priority to accelerate progress towards the elimination of TB. In many countries, patients with DR-TB are either not diagnosed at all or receive a delayed diagnosis, leading to further spread and increased severity of the disease. WHO-endorsed molecular techniques should be adopted more widely to improve DR-TB detection and should be complemented with phenotypic alternatives where necessary.

By the end of this course, which provides a unique combination of practical guidance and expert advice, participants should have improved their ability to interpret results for selected WHO-recommended rapid molecular tests for the diagnosis of DR-TB in line with the latest WHO guidelines.

The course consists of four modules, which last approximately two hours, and accompanying materials, which are expected to require three hours. Participants who answer at least 80% of the online test questions correctly will receive a certificate of participation.

Hoping to count you among the participants, the OpenWHO team wishes you a successful training

OpenWHO is pleased to share 3 brand new courses that were recently launched to support the response to COVID-19:

• Severe Acute Respiratory Infection (SARI) Treatment Facility Design: This training package has been developed to meet the operational needs emerging with the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides a thorough understanding of the principles driving the design process of COVID-19 screening areas for health care facilities, community facilities and SARI treatment centres, including how to repurpose an existing building into a SARI treatment centre. (Also available in Arabic and Portuguese)
• Introduction to Go.Data – Field data collection, chains of transmission and contact follow-up: Go.Data is a field data collection platform focusing on case data (including lab, hospitalization and other variables though case investigation form) and contact data (including contact follow-up). This briefing package provides an orientation to the purpose, benefits and utilization of Go.Data, consisting of 7 modules with a narrated walkthrough of the key features of the Go.Data web-based platform and mobile application.
• COVID-19: How to put on and remove personal protective equipment (PPE): This is a guide for health care workers involved in patient care activities in a health care setting. It aims to show the type of personal protective equipment or PPE needed to correctly protect oneself.

More languages available

In addition to the new courses, OpenWHO is continuing to work with WHO regional and country offices, educational entities and volunteers to produce COVID-19 resources in as many languages as possible to help localize the response.

The platform now has a total of 52 resources for COVID-19 spread across 18 languages, with many more in the pipeline. The most recent translations include:

• SARI Treatment Facility Design in Arabic
• Clinical Care SARI in Spanish
• SARI Treatment Facility Design in Portuguese
• Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) for COVID-19 in Turkish
• Introduction to COVID-19 and emerging respiratory viruses in Indonesian

New certificates available

Many of the COVID-19 courses are now offering a Confirmation of Participation for participants who complete the specified amount of course material: ePROTECT Respiratory Infections, IPC for COVID-19, Clinical Care SARI, SARI Treatment Facility Design and Introduction to Go.Data.

In addition, the introductory COVID-19 course and the country preparedness and response course now offer a Record of Achievement for participants who score 80% or higher on course assessments.

Complete list of COVID-19 learning resources

In summary, OpenWHO currently offers courses covering the following topics and languages to support the response to COVID-19:

• A general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Hindi, Hungarian, Indian Sign Language, Indonesian, Macedonian, Persian, Portuguese, Serbian, Turkish and Vietnamese);
• Clinical care SARI (available in English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Portuguese and Vietnamese);
• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT (available in Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian and Portuguese);
• IPC for COVID-19 (available in Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Portuguese, Serbian and Turkish);
• COVID-19 operational planning guidelines and partners platform to support country preparedness and response (available in Chinese, English, French, Russian and Portuguese);
• SARI treatment facility design (available in Arabic, English and Portuguese);
• An introduction to Go.Data (available in English and coming soon in additional languages); and
• How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 (available in English and coming soon in additional languages).

Best wishes,

OpenWHO team

Everyone has the right to access life-saving knowledge and OpenWHO is continuing to work with partners to make its resources available in as many languages as possible. In March, the platform launched a new learning channel for COVID-19 courses in national languages, in addition to its channel for courses in the 6 official UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish). 

Courses on the national languages channel are the product of collaboration with WHO Country Offices, public health institutes and educational entities who have offered voluntary translation support to help localize the response efforts. On 23 March, OpenWHO launched its introductory COVID-19 video in Indian sign language, which is the first sign language resource on the platform. The channel also hosts trainings in Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Persian, Portuguese, Serbian, Turkish and Vietnamese, with additional resources added every week.

Spanish has now surpassed English as the most popular language for 2 COVID-19 courses, marking a new milestone for OpenWHO. The surge in enrolments is the product of collaboration with PAHO’s Virtual Campus for Public Health on course translation and dissemination.

The Spanish introductory course to COVID-19 has more than 132 000 enrolments on OpenWHO with another 87 000 enrolments in the same course hosted on the PAHO Virtual Campus. The Spanish Infection Prevention and Control course for COVID-19 has more than 127 000 enrolments with 22 000 more on PAHO’s platform.

In the last week, the ePROTECT health and safety course was also launched in Spanish on OpenWHO and the PAHO Virtual Campus.

The OpenWHO team is proud to share our introductory video on COVID-19 in Indian sign language!

This video is the latest result of collaboration with teams around the globe who have generously offered to translate WHO's COVID-19 learning materials into additional languages to reach as many people as possible. With the addition of Indian sign language, the introductory video is now available in 12 languages – including all six WHO official languages, as well as Hindi, Macedonian, Persian, Portuguese, Serbian and Turkish. The course can be accessed here: https://openwho.org/courses/intro-to-COVID-19-indian-sign-language

Hoping to count you among the participants, we wish you a successful training!

We are pleased to announce that new courses, new course materials as well as new language versions of courses related to the COVID-19 outbreak have been released on OpenWHO.

In the English course Emerging respiratory viruses, including COVID-19: methods for detection, prevention, response and control:

• A new course video has been added to "Module B2: Laboratory Investigations" which can be accessed by navigating to the “Learnings” tab on the course navigation toolbar.

Language versions of this course have been released in:

• Serbian
• Persian
• Turkish
• Russian
• Arabic
• Portuguese - New course video materials now available for modules A, C1 and C2!
• Spanish
• Simplified Chinese
• French
• Coming soon: Hindi, Italian, Macedonian, Vietnamese

The course Clinical Care Severe Acute Respiratory Infection is now available in:

• French
• Russian
• English
• Coming soon: Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese

The course Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) for Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) is now available in:

• Serbian
• Italian
• Portuguese
• Spanish
• Indonesian
• Japanese
• Russian
• French
• English - New course video materials now available for all three modules!
• Coming soon: Arabic, Chinese, Macedonian, Persian

The course ePROTECT Respiratory Infections is now available in:

• Portuguese
• Indonesian
• Russian
• French
• English
• Coming soon: Spanish, Arabic, Chinese

The course COVID-19: Operational Planning Guidelines and COVID-19 Partners Platform to support country preparedness and response is now available in English, but additional language versions are coming soon in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Russian, Italian.

In the midst of the outbreak, we are also pleased to announce that new materials on other health topics have been published:

• Introduction to Poliomyelitis and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in English
• Variole du singe: introduction (Monkeypox: Introduction) in French

Hoping to count you among the participants, we wish you a successful training!

OpenWHO’s learning resources for COVID-19 have been partially or fully translated into 18 national languages. The spontaneous translation offers have emerged from every continent of the world, with WHO Country Offices, public health institutes and education entities providing translation support, all seeking to provide voluntary support to help localize the response efforts.

More than 180 000 users have accessed the resources on OpenWHO.org, with 55 000 of those accessing the materials in a language other than English.

OpenWHO's introductory COVID-19 course has been translated into more national languages than any other course on the platform. From the original English, the course materials have been fully or partially translated into 15 languages: Full courses are available in all official UN languages (Arabic, French, Russian, Chinese and Spanish) along with Portuguese (Brazilian and European Portuguese), Turkish and Persian. Sections of the learning materials have been translated in Farsi, Italian, Mongolian, Macedonian, Sinhala, Tamil and Vietnamese.

In addition to the above languages, materials for other COVID-19 courses, including "Infection Prevention and Control for COVID-19" and "eProtect: Respiratory Infections" have been launched on the platform in Japanese and Indonesian. Translation of OpenWHO’s COVID-19 materials into Hindi will also be initiated shortly. The fully translated courses have been verified by WHO Country Offices or WHO technical personnel around the world, enforcing the WHO quality.

We are pleased to announce the online course “Monkeypox: Introduction” is now available on OpenWHO. You can access the course through the following link: https://openwho.org/courses/monkeypox-introduction.

Monkeypox is an emerging infectious disease caused by a virus transmitted to humans from infected animals, most commonly rodents. It can be spread to other people but person-to-person transmission alone cannot easily sustain an outbreak.

The clinical presentation is similar to that seen in the past with smallpox but less severe. Smallpox was eradicated worldwide in 1980; however, monkeypox still occurs sporadically in parts of Central and West Africa, near tropical rainforests. Typically, case fatality in monkeypox outbreaks has been 1-10% but with appropriate care, most patients will recover.

This course provides a general introduction to monkeypox and is intended for health personnel responsible for prevention and control of monkeypox.

By the end of this course, participants should be able to:

• understand the emergence of monkeypox;
• describe routes of transmission;
• list signs and symptoms;
• clinically identify monkeypox, chickenpox, and measles;
• describe laboratory specimens and tests; and
• discuss prevention and control strategies.

The course will take approximately 1 hour to finish.

Hoping to count you among the participants, we wish you a successful training!

Are you passionate about young people’s health? Do you have innovative ideas & solutions for how to keep them safe?

Then please submit your innovation solutions today to #RebootHealthChallenge!

The World Health Organization (WHO), supported by the UN Office of Information and Communications Technology (UN-OICT) and UNAIDS challenge you to address one of the urgent health challenges for the next decade: Reboot Health & Wellbeing – Keeping Young People Safe

Post your ideas today! https://ideas.unite.un.org/reboothealth/Page/Home

Who can participate? Individuals and groups of up to four (4) individuals. No age restrictions.

What do you need to submit?

• apps or games
• wearables, digital technologies, tools or platforms, products
• the creation or improvement of products, services, processes
• new approaches to collaboration or communication, or new ways of engaging young people and/or other stakeholders
• policy reform proposals

Submissions are allowed in any of the six official UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) and must be your original work.

Timeline

• 4 March 2020: entry into the challenge starts. The whole world is invited to ‘like’ and comment on their favorite ideas as long as the challenge is open.
  
• 4 March - 15 April 2020: challenge runs online. Public review and comments enabled.
• 15 April 2020 at 11:59 PM: deadline for submission of solutions.
• 15 April 2020 - 22 April 2020: Public review and comments continue.
• June 2020: Up to three (3) winners are announced on WHO website and invited to an award ceremony at WHO’s Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland as part of a one week program with the Department for Digital Health and Innovation.

Note: Only one (1) submission is allowed per individual or group of individuals. Submissions must be made in your own personal capacity, and not as a representative of an organization. Read terms and conditions and Application Rules.

For any questions, please contact innovation@who.int

We are pleased to announce that the online course “COVID-19: Operational Planning Guidelines and COVID-19 Partners Platform to support country preparedness and response” is now available on OpenWHO. You can access the course through the following link: https://openwho.org/courses/UNCT-COVID19-preparedness-and-response-EN

In order to assist UN country teams in scaling up country preparedness and response to COVID-19, WHO has developed these learning modules.

This 3-module learning package, a companion to the Operational Planning Guidelines to Support Country Preparedness and Response, introduces the context for the need for a coordinated global response plan to the COVID-19 outbreak. It provides the required guidance to implement the Operational Planning Guidelines to Support Country Preparedness and Response. These planning guidelines describe priority steps and actions to be included in countries’ preparedness and response plans across the major areas of public health preparedness and response. This is aligned with the COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan (SPRP).

By the end of this course, participants should be able to:

• Educate themselves and others about the importance of operationalizing the SPRP for the COVID-19 outbreak using the Operational Planning Guidelines
• Describe the 8 major pillars of public health preparedness and response and initial actions to be taken by the UN country teams
• Access the full set of actions, performance indicators and resources needed to conduct the preparedness level assessment using the COVID-19 Partners Platform

There are 3 modules, as follows:

• Module 1: Mission and purpose of this program (incl. COVID-19 knowledge)
• Module 2: Country-level preparedness and response
• Module 3: Pillars of the public health response

It will take approximately 1 hour to finish Modules 1 and 2 and another hour to finish Module 3.

A Record of Achievement will be available to participants who score 80% or higher in the cumulative course assessment for both Modules 1 and 2. Module 3 is free of any certification.

Hoping to count you among the participants, the OpenWHO team wishes you a successful training!

We are pleased to announce the online course “Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) for Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19)” is now available on OpenWHO. You can access the course through the following link: https://openwho.org/courses/COVID-19-IPC-EN.

This course provides information on what facilities should be doing to be prepared to respond to a case of an emerging respiratory virus such as the novel coronavirus, how to identify a case once it occurs, and how to properly implement IPC measures to ensure there is no further transmission to HCW or to other patients and others in the healthcare facility.

This training is intended for healthcare workers and public health professionals, as it is focused on infection prevention and control.

By the end of this course, participants should be able to:

• define IPC and its role in the context of preparedness, readiness and response;
• describe the current epidemiological COVID-19 situation, including case definitions and signs & symptoms;
• describe source control, administrative controls and environmental and engineering controls;
• describe the WHO-recommended IPC measures for health care facilities, including when dealing with suspect or confirmed COVID-19 cases;
• describe additional IPC measures to be taken to assist in general preparedness within a health care facility.

There are 3 modules, as follows:

• Module 1: Preparedness, readiness and IPC
• Module 2: The novel coronavirus (COVID-19): its epidemiology, risk factors, definitions and symptomology
• Module 3: Standard precautions, transmission-based precautions & COVID-19 specific recommendations

The course will take approximately 1 hour to finish.

Hoping to count you among the participants, we wish you a successful training!

We are pleased to announce that the online course “ePROTECT respiratory occupational health and safety” is now available on OpenWHO. You can access the course through the following link: https://openwho.org/courses/eprotect-acute-respiratory-infections

All personnel responding to outbreaks of Acute Respiratory Infections (ARIs) need to have the basic knowledge and skills to mount an effective response. They need to understand what ARIs are, how they are transmitted, how to assess the risk of infection and the basic hygiene measures to protect themselves.

This course provides a general introduction to Acute Respiratory Infections (ARIs) and basic hygiene measures to protect against infection.

By the end of this course, participants should understand:

• the basic principles of acute respiratory infections;
• how to assess the risk of infection; and
• basic hygiene measures to protect against infection.

There are 4 modules, as follows:

• Module 1: Acute Respiratory Infections (ARIs) of public health concern - Introduction
• Module 2: How to protect yourself against Acute Respiratory Infections (ARIs)
• Module 3: Basic hygiene measures
• Module 4: Wearing a medical mask

The course will take approximately 2 hours to finish. There is no certificate available at this time.

Hoping to count you among the participants, the OpenWHO team wishes you a successful training!

We are pleased to announce the online course “Introduction to Poliomyelitis and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative” on OpenWHO. You can access the course through the following link: https://openwho.org/courses/polio-introduction/

This online training will be used to teach and refresh participants on the basics of the poliovirus, introduce the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) partnership, and provide an overview of our core response strategies and the remaining challenges to eradication.

Polio is a virus that spreads from person-to-person with the ability to cause paralysis. In 1988, the World Health Assembly passed a resolution to eradicate polio. At the time, there were 125 endemic countries. Currently, wild poliovirus remains in only two countries: Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) is a partnership led by six agencies: WHO, CDC, UNICEF, Rotary BMGF and GAVI. These agencies work together in key areas of surveillance, vaccination, communication, and research to eradicate polio.

This course utilizes short videos and quizzes to introduce the material and test your understanding.

By the end of this course, participants should:

• Describe the poliovirus, including transmission and key definitions;
• Explain the differences between the two polio vaccines and how they contribute to prevention;
• Outline the key components of the polio eradication strategy;
• Summarize the current status of polio eradication; and
• Describe the remaining challenges to polio eradication.

There are six modules, as follows:

• Module 1: Introduction
• Module 2: The Poliovirus
• Module 3: Polio Vaccines
• Module 4: The GPEI Partnership and the Polio Eradication Status
• Module 5: Polio Eradication Strategies
• Module 6: Challenges to Polio Eradication

The course will take approximately one hour to finish. Participants can earn a Record of Achievement by scoring 80% and above on all course assessments.

Hoping to count you among the participants, the OpenWHO team wishes you a successful training!

We are delighted to introduce you to the new online course “Health Cluster Coordination”. This course provides a general introduction to the work of the Health Cluster, which aims to save lives and promote dignity in humanitarian and public health emergencies, and to strengthen the efficiency and accountability of all stakeholders in responding to humanitarian crises. The course can be accessed via the following link: https://openwho.org/courses/health-cluster

By the end of this course, participants should be able to understand the framework of the Health Cluster’s mandate, responsibilities, strategies, lines of accountability and principles in order to lead and coordinate effective, efficient, timely and predictable evidence-based humanitarian health interventions in acute and protracted emergencies.

The full course consists of 17 modules (see below) and will take about 9 hours to complete. Don’t worry - each module can be undertaken separately, whenever it’s most convenient for you! At the end of the course, a record of achievement will be offered to those who earn more than 80% of the maximum number of points from the module assessments. You will also receive a confirmation of participation on completing at least 80% of the course modules.

This interactive online course has been developed by the Global Health Cluster in collaboration with the Health Cluster Capacity Development Task Team, WHO colleagues and our partners from country, regional and global levels who have generously contributed their time and experience. The work was funded by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Whether you are new to the Health Cluster; a more experienced Health Cluster, WHO colleague or partner; are considering joining an emergency roster or have a keen interest in coordination, we strongly encourage you to complete this Health Cluster Coordination online course.

We hope you enjoy the course and would welcome your feedback at healthcluster@who.int. Please also feel free to disseminate this message to your networks. Best regards,

Global Health Cluster team and OpenWHO team

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https://www.who.int/health-cluster/capacity-building/e-learning/en/

17 modules:

• Module 1: Introduction
• Module 2: Global Commitments for Humanitarian and Public Health Emergencies
• Module 3: Health Cluster Coordination: Principles and Functions
• Module 4: Public Health Information Services (PHIS) Standards
• Module 5: Needs Assessment
• Module 6: Public Health Situation Analysis
• Module 7: The Health Resources Availability Monitoring System (HeRAMS) Approach
• Module 8: Humanitarian Response Planning
• Module 9: Cross-Cutting Issues
• Module 10: Inter-Cluster Coordination
• Module 11: The Humanitarian Development and Peace Nexus
• Module 12: Health Advocacy
• Module 13: Resource Mobilisation
• Module 14: Humanitarian Health Response Monitoring
• Module 15: Cluster Coordination Performance Monitoring (CCPM)
• Module 16: Humanitarian Preparedness and Contingency Planning
• Module 17: Transition and Deactivation of Clusters

Nous sommes heureux d'annoncer que le cours en ligne « Virus respiratoires émergents, y compris le nouveau coronavirus (nCoV) : méthodes de détection, de prévention, de réaction et de contrôle » est désormais disponible sur OpenWHO. Vous pouvez accéder au cours en utilisant le lien suivant : https://openwho.org/courses/introduction-au-ncov.

Les coronavirus sont une vaste famille de virus susceptibles de provoquer des maladies diverses chez l'homme, allant du simple rhume au syndrome respiratoire du Moyen-Orient (MERS) et au syndrome respiratoire aigu sévère (SRAS).

Un nouveau coronavirus (CoV) a été identifié en 2019 à Wuhan, en Chine. Il s'agit d'un nouveau coronavirus qui n'avait pas encore été identifié chez l'homme. Ce cours constitue une introduction générale au nCoV et aux virus respiratoires émergents ; il est destiné aux professionnels de santé publique, aux gestionnaires d'incidents, coordonnateurs d’urgence et aux collaborateurs travaillant pour les Nations Unies, les organisations internationales, ainsi que les ONG.

À la fin de ce cours, vous serez en mesure de décrire :

• La nature des virus respiratoires émergents, la façon de détecter et d'investiguer une épidémie, les stratégies de prévention et de contrôle des épidémies dues aux nouveaux virus respiratoires ;
• Les stratégies qui devraient être utilisées pour communiquer les risques et impliquer les communautés dans la détection, la prévention et la réponse à l'émergence d'un nouveau virus respiratoire.

Il est composé de trois modules, répartis comme suit :

• Virus respiratoires émergents, y compris le nouveau coronavirus (nCoV) : Introduction
• Module A : Introduction aux virus respiratoires émergents, y compris le nouveau coronavirus (nCoV)
• Module B : Détection des virus respiratoires émergents, y compris le nCoV : surveillance et recherche en laboratoire

Le cours durera environ 3 heures.

Remarque :

• Les équipes de l'OMS travaillent sur des modules supplémentaires qui seront mis en ligne dans les prochains jours.
• Vous serez avertis lorsque de nouveaux modules et de nouvelles vidéos seront mis en ligne. Actuellement, le matériel est proposé sous forme de diapositives.
• À l'avenir, ce cours permettra d'obtenir une attestation, lorsque tous les modules auront été publiés et qu'un quiz aura été ajouté à chaque module.
• Les supports de cours sont en cours de traduction dans d'autres langues.

En espérant vous compter parmi les participants, l'équipe d'OpenWHO vous souhaite une bonne formation !

WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme (WHE) issues real-time training to help health workers around the world fight the 2019 nCoV outbreak.

WHE’s Learning and Capacity Development team worked with WHO experts to quickly develop and deliver an online training on the detection, prevention, response and control of the coronavirus even before the outbreak was declared a public health emergency of international concern. The course is a new online learning resource on OpenWHO.org which was established three years ago for when emergencies arise, when we would have to reach millions of people across the world in real-time with accessible learning materials.

The course “Emerging respiratory viruses, including nCoV: methods for detection, prevention, response and control” is a free, open-source learning resource for anybody interested in the novel coronavirus. It is also a very useful source of knowledge for any WHO staff.

The course was published on January 26th and has now more than 25,000 enrolled users in a period of 10 days. Approximately 3,000 new users have registered for the online resource every day since its launch, illustrating the high levels of interest in the virus among health care professionals and the general public. In addition, more than 200,000 people have viewed the introductory video in the course on YouTube.

The learning resource is currently in production and translation into all official languages and Portuguese.

We are pleased to announce the online course “WHO Critical Care Severe Acute Respiratory Infection Training Short Course” on OpenWHO. You can access the course through the following link: https://openwho.org/courses/severe-acute-respiratory-infection

The WHO Critical Care Training Short Course for Severe Acute Respiratory Infection (SARI) includes content on clinical management of patients with a severe acute respiratory infection.

This course is intended for clinicians who are working in intensive care units (ICUs) in low and middle-income countries and managing adult and pediatric patients with severe forms of acute respiratory infection (SARI), including severe pneumonia, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), sepsis and septic shock. It is a hands-on practical guide to be used by health care professionals involved in critical care management during outbreaks of influenza virus (seasonal) human infection due avian influenza virus (H5N1, H7N9), MERS-CoV, nCoV or other emerging respiratory viral epidemics.

By the end of this course, participants should:

• Possess some of the necessary tools that can be used to care for the critically ill patient from hospital entry to hospital discharge.

There are 14 modules, as follows:

• Module 1: Introduction to nCoV and IPC
• Module 2: Clinical Syndromes and Pathophysiology of Sepsis and ARDS
• Module 3: Triage
• Module 4: Monitoring
• Module 5: Diagnostics
• Module 6: Oxygen Therapy
• Module 7: Antimicrobials
• Module 8: Sepsis
• Module 9: Mechanical Ventilation
• Module 10: Sedation
• Module 11: Best Practices to Prevent Complications
• Module 12: Liberation from Mechanical Ventilation
• Module 13: Quality in Critical Care
• Module 14: Pandemic Preparedness and Ethical Considerations

The course will take approximately 10 hours to finish.

Hoping to count you among the participants, the OpenWHO team wishes you a successful training!