Description of Session
Digital health (DH) technologies widely referred to as ehealth technologies, present new or improved ways of delivering healthcare, conducting health promotion activities and monitoring public health. Its fast-changing landscape requires the health workforce to renew their digital skills. Currently, the innovations are not matched to the requisite health worker usage skills. To this effect, ehealth strategies across the African region have highlighted the need to train DH workforce. In addition to skills and experience to apply eHealth in the management and delivery of care, the workforce needs skills to design, build, operate and support eHealth services. The diverse workforce herein referred to as Digital Health Worker (DHW), can be drawn from multiple professional backgrounds and diverse service providers to develop, operate and support the national eHealth environment. However, they should qualify with minimum set of competencies that enable them work with any set of DH technologies and anywhere in the region. Despite the revolutionizing power of ICT in health, health workers lag behind and have failed to cope with the fast-changing technology. This is reflected as a lack of competency, creating human resource gaps, e.g., good communicator, professional technologist, advocate, etc required of DHW in the African region. In addition, existing DH programmes in the region lack balanced course programmes to develop these core competencies. Also, the corresponding online training is modelled after the traditional face-to-face training, limiting the opportunity for the in-service health worker. Therefore, the session will discuss competencies required of a DHW across the African region and the need for a regional curriculum. The discussion will base on; i. assessment of various medical and DH frameworks including CanMEDs and European Digital Competence frameworks; ii. review of thirteen medical informatics curricula (USA, UK and African region); iii. Lesotho DH curriculum for health leaders/managers.
