One Health Disaster Front Liner Module Development Workshop
MyOHUN Develops a Module to Train Workers on the Front Lines of Disaster Response
With today’s emerging infectious disease issues, training is necessary to ensure competent frontline health workers are deployed to a disaster area. From 16 to 19 January 2018, a One Health Disaster Front Liner Module Development Workshop was held in Melaka, Malaysia. A total of 25 academics and field experience officers from the Ministry of Health, National Disaster Management Association (NADIM), National Disaster Management Agency (NADMA), Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Hospital Serdang and Hospital Sultan Ismail Johor Bahru attended the activity. This 4-day training aimed to develop the basic One Health Disaster Front Liner Module covering the four phases of emergency management.
Currently, there is no on-the-job training to produce competent frontline health workers before deploying them to a disaster area, thus the competencies proposed for the module cover four areas of emergency management, which are the mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery stage before, during, and after deployment of the frontline health workers. The activity consolidated all necessary existing modules from three main public universities, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia-Japan International Institute of Technology, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, and the Southeast Asia Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.
Using the existing curricula by these universities as references, the module developers were able to list the required training materials and assessment components, including a field simulation for future learners to demonstrate their technical and non-technical skills before, during, and after deployment to a disaster area. At the end of the workshop, Dr. Rosnah Ismail, a Medical Lecturer of Occupational Health at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, developed a matrix of basic competencies against the One Health Core Competencies in the module.
A trial-run session to test the module developed during the previous workshop was held on 1 March 2018 at the State Health Department Negeri Sembilan with 27 medical practitioners as participants. Through the trial-run, the module was tested before moving to the refinement stage for the chapters and contents.
On 20 and 21 March 2018, 21 academics and field experience officers from various agencies gathered in Le Meridien, Putrajaya to refine the module. The module improvements were based on the trial-run session that was held earlier that month. The module has been finalized and is expected to be published in early 2019.
About the Author
Norsaiful Bahri Abdul Habib is a publicity and communications officer with the Malaysia One Health University Network (MyOHUN), a network supported by the USAID One Health Workforce project.
