28 May 2017 - WHO Egypt country office, in collaboration with the American University in Beirut, organized a 4-day training of trainers’ workshop on the use of Moodle application for designing online training courses.

The workshop was held from 20 to 23 May 2017 at the WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean. Participants were trained to understand the logic, functions, and abilities of Moodle as a platform for designing "online courses" which are comprehensive, interactive, with multiple modalities, certification process, credentialing mechanisms, and other features.

Two groups participated in the course; the first was the family practice model group coming from the Ministry of Health and Population, who were trained to use the Moodle application to develop a certified family practice online course. The second was the patient safety course group, coming from Alexandria University, who were trained to use the tool for developing online patient safety courses.

Participants from the two groups included university professors, medical faculty members, nurses, physicians, pharmacists, dentists, and ICT engineers.

The workshop was completely “hands-on” and at its end, participants were able to design sample curricula in each of family practice and patient safety certified training courses.

This training is one step in a comprehensive plan to develop a bridging program for building capacities of general practitioners in family medicine; and another plan to establish an online curriculum in patient safety. WHO is working with the Ministry of Health and Population and with Alexandria University to design and support implementation of both programs.