Is Healthcare Training in Corona keeping up with these rapidly evolving and uncertain times?

With emerging technology innovations, the healthcare services and technology market is rapidly rising which creates opportunities, risks, and need for training in the sector and those in the broader healthcare value chain. New services and technology have turned out to be the fastest-growing profit pool in the healthcare industry which is creating new values in the services significantly.  Major technological advances involve the digitization of healthcare. There is an increasing need for personalization of the user training which can help them to gain knowledge according to personal capacity of learning. Healthcare education is a very diverse field of education that inquires more about the preparation of professionals for a rapidly evolving healthcare market which can lead them immediately in the field after completing their education.

Training health professionals is important to ensure their skills improve and quality of healthcare, but also to keep them motivated by adding more value. In this crucial time of COVID-19, most of the world faced the failure of their healthcare systems to manage such a big crisis. Healthcare training is crucial for medical professionals which needs additional exploration. 

To support healthcare professionals during the current crisis, there are increasing online courses available by the governments and WHO. Here are some best options by WHO for the healthcare professional to get help; 

Free COVID-19 online courses on OpenWHO

• Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) for COVID-19
• Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT
• COVID-19: Operational Planning Guidelines and COVID-19 Partners Platform to support country preparedness and response
• Severe Acute Respiratory Infection (SARI) Treatment Facility Design
• Clinical Care Severe Acute Respiratory Infection
• COVID-19: How to put on and remove personal protective equipment
• Standard precautions: Hand hygiene
• Decontamination and sterilization of medical devices
• Standard precautions: Injection safety and needle-stick injury management

Demands of healthcare training have never been greater than today as the COVID-19 pandemic put pressure on the whole healthcare system. This increased pressure can take the healthcare workers towards a higher frequency of stress and anxiety. There is one way to deal with such challenges which is, through resilience training. In the new normal healthcare system; training the healthcare staff needs to implement basic precautions for the prevention and control following the disease transmission dynamics.

In healthcare training, management and leadership are the most vital players to get responsibility for staff satisfaction, creating more engagement and retention. There is always a need for good management and leadership to decide when and what is needed for the health professional to keep their skills up to date and motivational engaged in their profession.

Providing training on the best practices, according to the needs is vital, is always needed which helps to improve the quality of services and satisfaction of the patients. In the post-covid19 world, as the world is opening lockdown rapidly now, there is a massive need to address infection control in nursing homes and dental settings, childcare centers, and clinical perspectives from across the healthcare systems.

In most countries even in developed regions of the world, it is provided without much planning. There is always a need for proper assessment of professionals which can help to know the effectiveness and evaluation of the values added by these training sessions.  In low-resource countries mostly there is no compulsion to such training and enhancing the competence of the healthcare professional. In most of the developed countries, quality improvement modules for healthcare professionals tend to focus on the improvements in their practices and introducing them to new technological advancements. 

For healthcare professionals, continuing professional development training is becoming essential and growing faster than university education. There is a growing acknowledgment of the value of multidisciplinary training which involves the practical work and adding these practical components in the courses. Simulation is one of the best training methodologies adopted in healthcare education which is also becoming popular as a training approach. Ongoing training includes workshops, online courses, collaborative and ad hoc training which can support specific projects. There is a growing trend in the training process which helps participants to put what they have learned into practice or to learn key skills ‘on the job’.

In recent years, the concept of quality training improvement has become more extensively adopted and gradually more available, especially for qualified professionals to upgrade the prior training. However, a great concern remains unsure about training in quality improvement which includes appropriate content, delivery process and outcomes in the practice, especially in the mass crisis situation. This all needs to focus on “how to measure and ensure quality within training” and “how to put the focus on digital training” to pass through this pandemic.