EHS-COVID (553) The Lancet: Challenges and opportunities for educating health professionals after the COVID-19 pandemic

31 October, 2022

Dear HIFA colleagues,

In our previous discussions on HIFA we have noted that COVID-19 has increased the need for digital health and has accelerated its development, but has also has tended to exclude those who are already disadvantaged.

This Lancet paper looks closely at the 'challenges and opportunities for educating health professionals after the COVID-19 pandemic' with particular reference to the large-scale application of information technology to education.

CITATION: Challenges and opportunities for educating health professionals after the COVID-19 pandemic

Julio Frenk et al. The Lancet

REVIEW| VOLUME 400, ISSUE 10362, P1539-1556, OCTOBER 29, 2022

Published: October 29, 2022 DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)02092-X

SUMMARY

The education of health professionals substantially changed before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2010 Lancet Commission examined the 100-year history of health-professional education, beginning with the 1910 Flexner report. Since the publication of the Lancet Commission, several transformative developments have happened, including in competency-based education, interprofessional education, and the large-scale application of information technology to education. Although the COVID-19 pandemic did not initiate these developments, it increased their implementation, and they are likely to have a long-term effect on health-professional education. They converge with other societal changes, such as globalisation of health care and increasing concerns of health disparities across the world, that were exacerbated by the pandemic. In this Health Policy, we list institutional and instructional reforms to assess what has happened to health-professional education since the publication of the Lancet Commission and how the COVID-19 pandemic altered the education process.

The authors make three recommendations:

1. Use education for life as a principle for health-professional education...

2. Use competency-based education in new areas including [information technology and big data interpretation...]

3. Use learning technology to make health professional education effective, efficient, and inclusive...

Neil Pakenham-Walsh, Global Coordinator HIFA, www.hifa.org neil@hifa.org

Global Healthcare Information Network: Working in official relations with WHO