Case Study 1
Healthcare Personnel Training Program
For many years, we have dispatched permanent and
mobile medical missions to partner countries to facilitate
medical cooperation. In our experience, we have often
found that partner countries face a serious shortage of
educational resources pertaining to health care. In places
where medical systems are underdeveloped and lack
funding and human resources, it is much more difficult
to provide local medical personnel with the training they
need, making it difficult to raise the standard of medical
services in these countries.
To help our partner countries achieve the MDGs
related to health care and to deepen our cooperation with
them in matters of public health, we have been working
with IHCSA institutions since 2006 to implement the
Healthcare Personnel Training Program. This program
provides medical personnel from partner countries with
annual opportunities to visit Taiwan and learn about
advanced medical technologies. This increases the
skills, experience and professional, clinical know-how of
medical personnel from partner countries and realizes
the objective of upgrading the quality of the health care
services available in their country.
Raising Project Effectiveness by Adjusting
Curricula to Partners’ Needs
As part of our efforts to refine the program, we
considered the fact that we had previously offered only
one medical training program per year at a fixed time.
Unfortunately, a number of medical staff in our partner
countries may not have been able to attend due to
scheduling conflicts. Therefore, since the second half
of 2011, we have changed the system to cater to the
needs of individual partner countries. We now plan two- to
three-month training courses based on the availability of
their medical personnel to help build capacity and put the
principle of ownership into practice.
We are also employing more pre- and post-training
communications tools to allow us to understand and track
the needs and learning outcomes of trainees. This helps
us ensure that the program provides genuinely effective
training and keeps with the spirit of the project cycle.
For example, we design curricula based on trainees’
initial needs prior to the commencement of training.
After training, trainees provide feedback and confirm the
effectiveness of our training content, which allows us to
make moderate changes to the program based on their
practical needs. We have also implemented moderate
controls during training, including weekly training reports
to be completed by trainees, to help us understand their
progress and accomplishments. We also ask represen-
tatives of each training unit to complete a questionnaire
to check that the progress and content of each program
conforms to the original plans.
Ensuring Skills Transfer by Tracking the
Effectiveness of Post-training Outcomes
After trainees have returned home, we dispatch
Taiwanese units to trainees’ home countries to assess
the quality of services they are providing in their local
organizations. We respond with demonstrative teaching
methods to ensure that they are using the training they
received properly. This ensures that the program is
transferring skills as effectively as possible. In the past
year, we have dispatched personnel to Burkina Faso,
Nauru and Tuvalu to appraise the effectiveness of our
programs for our trainees. In this way, we improve the
content of our program and help our partners to improve
and enhance their health services.
Ms. Kimberly Tmilchol Idip, a nurse from Palau, checks items in an operating
theater stockroom as part of management training during her Healthcare
Personnel Training Program placement at Shin Kong Wu Ho-Su Memorial
Hospital.
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