fulfill medical training
pp. 26-27 · Read in the full issue
Distance education can fulfill medical training needs in the Pacific
DUE to the geographical context, many Pacific Island health professionals face iso lated working conditions with difficult and limited communications. Distance education using new communication tools like e-mail, Internet, and video conference, can fulfil medical training needs in the Pacific.
Issues and experiences in this field were overviewed at a con ference on Telehealth in the Pacific in Noumea, New Caledonia.
The conference was hosted by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community and co-organised by two regional health network PACNET and WPHNet.
Several training regional institutions representatives stressed the advantages of the distance education mode over traditional and conventional methods.
They explained that distance education allowed a greater num ber of students to be trained, at a lower unit cost and over a longer period of time. The health-distance education allows learners to stay in the field and to apply newly acquired theory to their prac tical working situation.
In Solomon Islands, five post basic nursing certificate courses for health workers have been developed. The project started in 1994 to increase educational opportunities for nurses and to trial distance education as a mean of improving their knowledge and practices, Mrs Kenyon from the Solomon Ministry of Health said.
The first results so far have been positive and the programme was extended in 1996 to a national distance education pro gramme. Further courses have been developed in
Paediatrics and Nursing administration.
The University of Guam also took the chal lenge. Mrs Fochtman, Dean of the College of Nursing and Health Sciences, explained that the College provides since 1997 a nursing distance education with the help of PEACES AT site opera tors and course co-ordinators working in Palau, Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, Kosrae and the Marshall Islands.
Pacific Islander physicians can also benefit from this new training mode. Dr Fiddes from the Fiji School of Medicine said that courses for the post-graduate medical training were being devel oped in surgery, obstetrics, anaesthesia, paedi atrics and medicine.
The project is funded by AusAID, the Fiji Government and the US Department of the Interior.
The first Diploma candidates were to graduate in December 1998 and the first Pacific trained spe cialists at the end of the year 2001. ■
A Greenpeace diver
is decentaminated
after performing a
sampling operation
at the end of the
discharge pope from
the Sellafield
nuclear power plant
in northwest England Wednesday May 27, 1998. (AP Photo/Greenpeace)