By Kemo Cham
Sierra Leone is set to take another major leap in global public health response with the planned introduction of courses in two key international health guidelines.
The World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday announced a pilot project that will see the two country introduce courses in Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) and the International Health Regulations (IHRs) 2005 into its health personnel training curricula.
The move, according to the UN health agency, is expected to put Sierra Leone on track to become a model in Africa to meet the challenge of health emergency response by preparing its health workforce to detect, prevent, control and effectively respond to public health emergencies.
The IDSR is an integrated global alert and response system for epidemics and other public health emergencies based on strong national public health systems. And the IHRs are an international legal instrument requiring countries to report certain disease outbreaks and public health events to WHO.
The current health training curricula in Sierra Leone focus mainly on clinical and technical skills. This leaves officials in charge of disease prevention and control with little or no knowledge on public health issues, particularly in priority disease detection and response skills competencies.
Sierra Leone was selected to participate in this pilot project alongside the East African country of Tanzania. WHO said the two countries will become the first in Africa to implement such an initiative into their curricula of tertiary institutions which also offer students the opportunity to take courses in IDSR and IHR 2005 at different levels.
Sierra Leone is expected to commence implementation at the beginning of the next academic year in October.
In a statement, the WHO Country Office in Freetown said health authorities and experts from the Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MoHS), universities, colleges and other health training institutions in collaboration with WHO have developed and validated the pre-service and in-service curricula to help facilitate the process. These experts, it said, are also providing technical guidance on implementation modalities of the initiative.
The WHO said the curricula have been developed to meet the needs of medical, nursing, veterinary, laboratory, environmental health, para-medical, public health, epidemiology, health information, health management, and health education skills as well as faculty and course content developers and administrators.
“Highly skilled human resources for health are critical for improving health security. However, the traditional in-service training for surveillance alone is not effective enough to build and sustain national IDSR-IHR capabilities. This is why WHO is supporting the country to institutionalize pre-service training and continuous professional education,” Dr Evans Liyosi, WHO Country Representative in Sierra Leone, sad in a statement copied to Politico.
“Essentially, improved surveillance infrastructure and competent frontline personnel is important in disease prevention and control and in enhancing health security,” Dr Charles Njuguna, Lead for Health Security and Emergencies at the WHO Country Office, added in the same statement.
This is the latest in a series of transformative moves in Sierra Leone’s public health surveillance system after the devastating Ebola outbreak in 2014-2016.
Last June, the country became the first in Africa to have a fully functional electronic disease surveillance and response system that allows health workers to collect and immediately report priority health information to the national level from every public health facilities nationwide.
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