SAEM Pulse January-February 2022

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Training Health Care Workers to Combat COVID-19 in Resource Limited Settings By Matthew Strehlow, MD, and S.V. Mahadevan, MD “Emergency care workers across the world are battling COVID-19 with not only limited resources but limited information. Massive Open Online Courses can help bridge this knowledge gap.” As Omicron and other COVID-19 variants create new spikes in cases around the globe, health care workers in low resource settings continue to struggle with limited health care resources as well as access to trusted information sources on evidenced-based medical practices. A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) developed and launched by a broad coalition of medical educators and led by Stanford Emergency Medicine International has worked to bridge this knowledge gap.

their population and the United States has leveled out at 60%, much of the rest of the world remains woefully behind — just 6% are fully vaccinated in World Bank designated low-income countries. Inadequate vaccination rates in combination with chronic financial, equipment and human resource shortages, have created an environment where COVID-19 morbidity follows the path of previous scourges, like malaria and HIV, where a disproportionate disease burden affects the most vulnerable populations. A lack of trusted, accessible information resources and a deluge of misinformation has further exacerbated resource limitations in these locations.

While countries such as Singapore and the United Arab Emirates have fully vaccinated more than 90% of

MOOCs have gained prominence as a means of spreading knowledge and information over the past decade.

Appropriate nasopharyngeal sample acquisition technique

Appropriate nasopharyngeal sample acquisition technique

However, as MOOCs have evolved, they have been primarily utilized by learners from high- and upper-middle-income countries to attain certification in areas such as mathematics and engineering or by traditional universities looking to expand their reach. The COVID-19 pandemic presented an ideal opportunity continued on Page 40

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