Short courses and continuing education

The annual Winter School short course programme is the oldest and one of the most regular features in the School of Public Health’s calendar; we celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2017. Each year we have welcomed between 150 and 700 colleagues and students from South Africa and other countries to participate in a wide range of short courses, engage with peers and experts, and enjoy the emblematic peanut butter and jam sandwiches. We have postponed the event only once – in 2010 when we moved it from June/July to September to avoid clashing with the Soccer World Cup. But in 2020, COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns saw us cancelling Winter School for the first time. Not only did travel restrictions and the need for social distancing make a face-to-face event impossible, but most of the usual course participants are health workers and managers who were at the centre of having to manage responses to the pandemic.

2019

In 2019, 164 participants attended nine courses from 1 – 19 July: • Health Management • Epidemiology and Control of HIV/AIDS • Tuberculosis and Malaria in the era of

Antiretrovirals • Globalisation and Health: Key Aspects for Policy Markers, Managers and Practitioners • Pharmaceutical Policy and Management • Understanding & Analysing Health Policy • Monitoring & Evaluation of Health & Development Programmes • Current Thinking and Practice in Health Promotion • Introduction to Complex Health Systems

2020 – and going forward

The cancellation in 2020, the uncertainty of when we will be able to have big face-to-face events again, and the sudden ubiquity of on-line meetings and events, has caused us to reflect on how can we refresh our continuing professional development (CPD) role and offerings. Various opportunities have been created by a much wider use of on-line engagements – for example connecting people over big geographies; creating peer learning platforms; giving access to colleagues who, for one reason or other, cannot travel to Cape Town for a course.

After several surveys of our students and Winter School alumni, and after extensive internal conversations, we are in the process of reconceptualising and expanding our CPD programme: restructuring existing short courses to be offered on-line, creating webinars, and planning special events for our large pool of alumni. There is a lot to learn and consider: expanding our own capacity to provide excellent on-line facilitation; creating an integrated and seamless web platform for on-line events, keeping in mind data and bandwidth constraints of our constituency; exploring and advocating for the willingness of our own institutions, employers and professional bodies to recognise on-line events for CPD purposes; establishing the logistics and costing of on-line programmes. We hope to begin to make an initial menu of short courses and webinars available from the middle of 2021, and to then rapidly expand our programme in 2022. Please see our plans as they develop on our social media and new website: soph.uwc.ac.za.

‘I managed to create networks through attending Winter and Summer Schools … getting to know colleagues from different countries, cultures and background and their different experiences in the context of public health. This also meant I was able to see a bigger picture and not feel alone in my study journey. ‘UWC School of Public Health is an international institution which provides cutting edge, world class public health capacitation to students – which I found beneficial as I got to learn on real life problems, and we managed to provide real life and sustainable solutions. ‘As I am currently working as a programme manager in an international organisation, the courses on social determinants of health, health management and globalisation and health have been vital to my executing my role and responsibilities.’