A strong health workforce requires regular trainings to ensure workers keep on top of the current evidence base and grow to meet the evolving health landscape. New digital and data tools have been a critical part of this retooling. For Zabron Abel, Project Manager of the CBC and Business Development and Digital Health Manager for the Tanzanian Training Centre for International Health (TTCIH), eLearning platforms are an invaluable tool made more urgent by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The pandemic was a trigger that helped to build excitement and momentum for eLearning among health care workers,” said Abel. “For students stuck at home for more than three months, they could still learn from the safety and comfort of their own homes. That is hugely important for ensuring we can continue to grow our health workforce and respond to the changing demands of the health system.”
In 2021 the CBC celebrated the launch of a national eLearning platform that synchronizes and integrates with other existing in-service modules. It accompanies data use modules to equip health workers as critical thinkers, capable of using health data to make informed decisions about patient care. Though there have been a number of eLearning initiatives that supported both in-service and pre-service students for different health siloes, they were scaled to different degrees and often were not interoperable with one another. This made it difficult for students to navigate their lesson plans and even harder for universities and training institutions to track accreditations and school records.
“Adopting digital health tools to train future generations of health workers will ensure we’re using the most cutting-edge technology and are building thoughtful, analytical data users.”— Zabron Abel, Business Development and Digital Health Manager, TTCIH
Thanks to the efforts of champions, health workers in Tanzania are now benefiting from a new national eLearning platform for capacity building. Photo: PATH
It’s also personal for Abel, who has been involved in the CBC from the earliest days, when PATH and the government of Tanzania first conceived of the idea for a consortium dedicated to preparing the country’s future health workforce for the new demands and potential of digital health.
Today, the CBC is a dynamic partnership between the government, TTCIH, Ifakara Health Institute, Mzumbe University, University of Dodoma, and Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences, among other institutions. It aims to train the health workforce for the health challenges of today and tomorrow.
For Abel, active data users are an essential component of a well-trained health workforce. Digital health tools may make health data more pervasive and accessible, but health workers must also be empowered and incentivized to analyze and interpret data so they know which patients to prioritize, where additional outreach may be needed, and where they are falling behind in certain targets.
“Now health workers are [graduating] from universities and training institutions as capable data users,” said Abel.
He hopes the CBC will continue to convene well into the future. Abel said the consortium is helping to harmonize educational requirements and standardize curricula so that all future health workers are starting from the same data-enabled baseline.
“A well-equipped health workforce comprised of data users can lead to more resilient health systems,” said Abel.
