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Doctors, researchers and mid-career health professionals with diverse backgrounds and levels of expertise from the U.S. and around the world were among the first wave of students to take advantage of new distance-learning classes available through the Harvard Medical School Global Academy’s new portal.
“The Global Academy allows us to deliver the expertise of the School’s faculty to current and future health care professionals around the world,” said Ajay Singh, senior associate dean for global education and contributing education at HMS. “We’re taking advantage of the amazing advances in distance learning technology and pedagogy to expand the reach of our great teachers further than ever before.”
More than a dozen classes are now available through the Global Academy, which officially launched its web portal in November. Additional courses are scheduled to come online in the coming months.
Although the courses are open to all who are interested, they are designed with health care professionals in mind. Many of the courses meet continuing medical education requirements. Certificates are offered for many different professions, including physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners and social workers.
The courses include video lectures and interactive multimedia content led by HMS faculty, including many educators who have made significant contributions to their fields and, in some cases, invented them, according to Singh.
The classes are self-paced, enriched with interactive elements and case-based components, and are designed to provide timely and relevant information on new clinical innovations and important contemporary health challenges.
The Global Academy recently-announced a free, three-course program called the Opioid Use Disorder Education Program developed by HMS with support from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The first course, “Understanding Addiction,” provides information about the nature of addiction for nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, physicians, social workers and other health care providers who seek to better understand patients with substance use disorders. The two other courses, “Identification, Counseling and Treatment of Opioid Use Disorder” and “Collaborative Care Approaches for Management of Opioid Use Disorder” focus on how to support patients with OUD in a clinical setting. Each class provides 8 CME credits.
The Global Academy portal also features two blogs: Trends in Medicine focuses on emerging clinical and scientific issues in health care and medicine worldwide, while Lean Forward creates conversations around controversial issues in public health, medical ethics and health care delivery.
