Health services throughout Africa are short of doctors. Open and distance learning could play a vital role in scaling up the numbers of medical students.
Ethiopia has a population of 84 million people served by fewer than 1800 doctors, most of these in private practice. People are suffering and dying because they cannot get access to a doctor when they need one.
Recognising the need, the Ethiopian government has an ambitious plan to create 11 new medical schools and 8000 new places for medical students. However the country still has a desperate shortage of qualified people to train these new doctors.
The Open University is working with the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia to pilot open and distance learning medical training with students at St Paul's Millennium Medical School in Addis Ababa, which opened in 2008 (the Millennium Year according to the Ethiopian calendar).
Academics from the OU's Centre for Education in Medicine are working with Professor Gordon Williams, the foundation dean of St Paul's, to develop a range of learning resources for its students. These will form part of an innovative new medical curriculum which will shorten the length of time it takes to produce a qualified doctor.
The Open University hopes to expand this pilot to create a Centre of Excellence in Distance Learning which will support training for doctors in medical schools throughout Ethiopia. And it could be used to train health extension workers, district health officers, midwives and other paramedical staff that Ethiopia also needs.
The OU's open and distance learning model allows students to get the practical experience that is vital to trainee doctors. They will follow a "blended learning" curriculum which will include some hands-on training combined with study through learning materials and resources produced on the Open University model, including printed materials, interactive DVDs and CDs and videos of lectures and demonstrations.
Further in the future, the Open University hopes to work in partnership with other organisations in Ethiopia to develop a communications infrastructure to support online teaching.
Open and distance learning has enormous potential to allow Ethiopia to expand its medical training rapidly despite a shortage of trainers. It also offers a cost-effective and efficient way of producing a high-quality medical curriculum, which meets World Federation for Medical Education Global standards, for all the new medical schools. And it can be used to support the skills development and further training of medical staff already working in the field in remote and rural areas.
The Ethiopian project could act as a model for medical and paramedical training in other parts of Africa. There is considerable interest in using distance learning to overcome the shortage of resources and trained staff in many African countries, but no pilot projects or guidelines have yet been developed.
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