Stories from the field – Viet Nam

VIET NAM | Online learning unlocks training opportunities for COVID-19 responders

28 June 2021

Providing clinical knowledge and skills to health care workers and the public is critical in responding to public health emergencies. Realizing this, WHO launched OpenWHO – an online learning platform for health workers and emergency responders.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO Viet Nam unveiled Vietnamese courses on OpenWHO to help health care workers and medical and nursing students access information on the new virus. This initiative is an effort from WHO Viet Nam to promote e-learning as a major tool to disseminate knowledge effectively and in a timely manner to train health professionals on how to prepare for the COVID-19 response.

“By launching online Vietnamese courses on COVID-19, we hope that we can bring knowledge to learners, instead of having them travel to where knowledge is,” said Dr. Kidong Park, WHO Representative to Viet Nam. “This is particularly crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic as learning in traditional classrooms has been limited to comply with social distancing guidelines,” he added.

Courses have been translated into Vietnamese by a team of experienced medical experts led by WHO Viet Nam, so that all learners, especially health care professionals in Viet Nam, could access and make use of the courses on OpenWHO in their response to the new virus. By quickly localizing the courses, a large number of frontline health workers were able to access valuable information, contributing to the outbreak response in Viet Nam.

“I found the courses provided by WHO to be extremely useful to my current work in program management. They have helped me come up with effective planning for vaccine distribution,” said Tham Chi Dung – a medical doctor who took 2 courses on vaccination. “When I shared my certificates on Facebook, many colleagues of mine felt motivated and asked me about how to take courses on OpenWHO.”

Currently, the platform is providing 7 courses in Vietnamese on COVID-19-related issues. The first 2 courses in Vietnamese were launched in March 2020, focusing on general information about SARS‑CoV‑2 and clinical care of acute respiratory infections including COVID-19. The translated courses cover a wide range of content related to this emerging virus, including infection prevention, clinical care, care facilities design and vaccine-related issues.

Thanks to the close cooperation between WHO, Ministry of Health and medical universities, the courses were able to have broader impact, far beyond the OpenWHO platform. Firstly, the course content was used as reference material to develop learning materials for health care workers, especially primary health workers, and final-year medical and nursing students, who would be mobilized to assist in the epidemic response efforts. Secondly, several medical universities in Viet Nam, such as Hai Phong University of Medicine & Pharmacy and Pham Ngoc Thach University of Medicine & Pharmacy, promoted the Vietnamese OpenWHO links on their websites, making the courses even more accessible for a wider range of audiences. Finally, the Vietnamese Family Physician Association also disseminated the courses to all its members, including medical doctors and those in other disciplines in primary care, as a way of continuing medical education, to remove barriers to training for staff in remote medical facilities.

As the COVID-19 situation in Viet Nam remains complicated, the need for online training will definitely increase in the future. It is fortunate that we have the OpenWHO platform in place to address these important needs.

Photo: WHO Viet Nam

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This page was last changed at Tue, 13 Jul 2021 17:36:58 +0000.