Why Partner with CanHealth International?

CanHealth International sees its interprofessional health education activities as a long-term investment and collaborative relationship interested in providing:

• Value – Supporting health professionals in developing nations
• High standard, peer reviewed materials
• State-of-the-art technology
• Stimulation for students
• Standardization of knowledge

The international community has made valiant efforts to support healthcare delivery in developing nations, particularly when a disaster like Ebola strikes. But long term vision and investments are needed to continuously support healthcare workers so that they can successfully provide routine and preventative healthcare as well as urgent care in the face of population increases.

CanHealth’s platform is built on the basis of CESEI’s (The Center of Excellence for Simulation Education and Innovation) high-tech virtual classroom at Vancouver General Hospital for medical students, physicians, nurses, Canadian Forces medical technicians and other health careworkers. Hundreds of medical educators contributed to CESEI’s online courses, and the programs are accessed by hundreds of thousands of trainees annually. More than a thousand educational units are available in the electronic library, which are nearly all peer reviewed. CanHealth has engaged more than 200 specialists and experts in a variety of health education domains who are continuously working to develop educational units. Our strategy is to recruit more high-level specialists for the enrichment and maintenance of the electronic library and for further development of the creation of curricula and the peer review of all educational units.

Each educational unit features online lectures, text materials, movies, web objects with passive and active animations, assessments, evaluations, virtual classrooms, audiovisual capable discussion boards, student journals to support the educational environment, and will soon be compatible with handheld devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android technologies and others. CanHealth’s platform is also capable of providing collaborative research opportunities by creating an online collaborative environment for a number of researchers internationally, for grant writing and proposals, papers, and interactive audio-visual capable data sharing. This technology is also capable of healthcare delivery in specific cases.

CanHealth has additional unique technologies such as CyberPatient and LIVES (M-Learning). M-Learning technology is mainly used to deliver curricula in the simplest possible way to different learner groups who are participating in their own disparate languages, particularly for those with a visual disability or impairment. This technology is also designed to deliver basic knowledge and information and educational materials to the public, and is particularly useful in areas and regions where literacy is a major barrier to learning. CyberPatient is a revolutionary and powerful interactive multimedia tool that invites learners to examine, diagnose, and operate on virtual patients, then providing them with feedback on their performance. Cases are available with increasing degrees of difficulty, so that students can revisit cases they covered in an earlier stage of their training and study more advanced aspects of diagnosis and treatment for that particular disease.

One of the challenges experienced by developing countries is that healthcare professionals may train in different places, bringing different standards to their work. Standardization of training is recognized as a high priority in order to improve care. CanHealth International’s curricula can address this challenge by giving countries access to high quality, standardized training materials. By requiring every member of the team to complete continuing education curricula through CanHealth International, the hospital can reduce knowledge discrepancies, improve the quality of information and expertise, and ensure the team shares a common standard.

CanHealth has no intentions of replacing the educational systems already in place in any governing body or institution. CanHealth’s three fundamental aims are:

• To support institutions and health education systems with our state-of-the-art electronic library in the interest of enhancing their existing programs.
• To deliver accredited programs for nurses, midwives and others in partnership with local institutions and regulatory bodies.
• Standardization. In most developing nations specialists are trained in disparate internal and external environments, creating a vast variation of standards of care within healthcare organizations.

CanHealth International’s programs are envisioned as a way to reduce knowledge discrepancies and improve the quality of knowledge and expertise of a team to ultimately reach a common standard of care.