What is the Campus?
The VCPH is a strategic tool for PAHO technical cooperation.
As such, it is a space for distributing, managing, and updating knowledge in public health and for strengthening the capacities and competencies of the Region’s health teams. The guiding principles of its activities are consistent with PAHO’s values.
Values of the Pan American Health Organization
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Equity |
Striving for fairness and justice by eliminating differences that are unnecessary and avoidable. |
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Excellence |
Achieving the highest quality in what we do. |
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Solidarity |
Promoting shared interests and responsibilities and enabling collective efforts to achieve common goals. |
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Respect |
Embracing the dignity and diversity of individuals, groups, and countries. |
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Integrity |
Assuring transparent, ethical, and accountable performance. |
With these values as its cornerstone, the VCPH defines its vision, mission, and the guiding principles of its activities in education and technology.
Vision
To serve as the virtual platform of reference for human resources training in public health in the Americas.
Mission
To lead strategic collaborative efforts among Member States and other partners, to promote human resources for health training, for all people in all places.
Principles
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Public good |
Open, quality training for health personnel, which is an inexhaustible good that benefits the entire population. |
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Permanent education in health |
A model in which the right to lifelong education in the fullest sense converges with the transformation of health organizations. |
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Open and interoperable resource |
Cooperative sharing of developments, data, and applications with other computer systems that multiplies opportunities for access. |
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Collaborative work |
Promotion of work between education and health organizations through learning networks, together with the coordination of their interactions for local capacity building and better results. |
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Sustainability |
The search for alternatives to generate resources for maintaining or increasing the availability of education at no direct cost to health workers. |
The VCPH seeks to support technical cooperation activities in a virtual environment that facilitates:
The use of different formats and modalities, with emphasis on reflective practice.
Interaction among groups and people from different contexts and places.
Access to reliable sources of digital information.
Dialogue-based, multidirectional communication and learning that avoids one-way transmission.
The creation of virtual communities for research, updating, and practice.
Interprofessional education.
The VCPH is an educational environment with a social perspective that fosters diversity; it therefore proposes the development of inclusive and accessible training initiatives.
The Virtual Campus for Public Health (VCPH) is the educational platform of the Pan American Health Organization, conceived as a tool for technical cooperation.
The objectives of this article are to: characterize the training offered at the VCPH, identifying its virtual courses; characterize course participants; describe technological updating processes and the advances made in terms of accessibility; and identify the VCPH's relationship with the main lines of cooperation of the Pan American Health Organization.
The VCPH has developed 210 tutored courses and 226 self-learning courses since 2007, related to the Organization’s policies. Heterogeneous use of the campus was observed in the different areas of cooperation. The number of self-learning courses conducted during the pandemic surpassed the total figure accumulated in previous years. Participants are mainly from Latin America; 67.5% are women between 26 and 45 years of age; 57.1% have a university education, mainly in nursing or medicine; half of them work in hospitals and 35.8% at the first level of care. More than 90% of the participants had a favorable opinion of the topics addressed, the learning resources offered, and the characteristics of the virtual classroom. Among difficulties, they indicated little available time and poor internet access; among advantages, they emphasized independent schedules and access to various sources of information.
The available assessment tools are not sufficient to determine the impact of VCPH educational programs. The challenges are to deepen the accessibility and quality of education offered, strengthen links with areas of cooperation, and improve course evaluations and knowledge about VCPH users.
Access to the Special Report published in the Pan American Journal of Public Health
October, 2022
