Our objective: provide tools for health technicians
The COVID-19 pandemic posed a set of challenges for health systems in the Region of the Americas and around the world. The different professions that make up health teams in each country had to reorganize in order to respond to the health emergency while maintaining the continuity of services for chronic diseases, maternal and child health, among others. In this context, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and its Virtual Campus for Public Health (VCPH) supported these challenges.
During this dual mission, the Virtual Campus experienced significant growth in projects, users, and course enrollments across all countries in the Region of the Americas. However, this growth was not homogeneous: while there was a large increase in access by professionals from traditional disciplines, especially physicians and nurses, participation and access by other health workers, such as health technicians, was lower.
Health technicians perform technical tasks both in hospital facilities (laboratory technicians, radiology technicians, non-university trained nurses) and at the community level (community health workers). In the Region of the Americas, they have a diversity of training levels (basic technical training and higher-level technical training) and play an essential role in health teams and in access to services. Learn more about health technicians: https://www.paho.org/en/topics/health-technicians
The Virtual Campus for Public Health has set as one of its objectives to improve the reach of its educational offer to this group of workers. To advance in this direction, the Campus designed this project with the support of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID). As part of its project “Human resources for health in the post-COVID-19 period: Strengthening capacities for resilient health systems II”, AECID considered it important to allocate funds to identify the profiles of health technicians and the best practices to increase their access to the Virtual Campus.
The project was developed in conjunction with the Joaquim Venâncio Polytechnic School of Health of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a PAHO/WHO collaborating center, and consisted of two phases.
The results of the first phase (2023-2024) include a detailed analysis of the data of technicians enrolled in courses on the Virtual Campus, as well as their profiles and training pathways during the period 2018-2023.
The second stage (2025-2026) aimed to recognize and characterize the groups of technical workers at the primary care level and to identify the most effective educational and communication strategies to facilitate their access to the Virtual Campus. To this end, research was conducted using quantitative and qualitative techniques.
The final products of both stages of the project are presented below:
