Regional News

In Lima, Peru, public health experts meet to analyze trends and identify the challenges of public health education and production priorities of learning resources. The Pan American Health Organization is organizing this meeting through Project Human Resource for Health and PAHO Office in Peru. The meeting was held from 19 to 21 November 2012 at the premises of a downtown hotel in the city.

From 22 to 24 October, Regional Workshop was held for the development of Educational Virtual Clinic (CVD) Virtual Campus of Public Health, under the Ninth Regional Congress on Health Sciences Information Health-CRICS9 at headquarters Pan American Health organization in Washington DC

Chaired by Dr. Charles Godue Team Leader Human Resources PAHO and Dr. Jose B. Jardines Coordinator Virtual Campus of Public Health, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, United States, Panama and Puerto Rico with the objectives of:

It will be from 22 to 24 October in the ninth Congress Regional Information Health Sciences, organized by PAHO / WHO and BIREME in Washington, DC.

We regret to inform of the sudden and tragic death of Ms. Kenia Yohana Bautista Sabonge, National Consultant for Adolescents and HIV / AIDS in the PAHO/WHO Country Office in Honduras, which occurred on September 10, 2012 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

Kenia Yohana Bautista Sabonge was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on July 24, 1978. She received the title of Industrial Engineering at the Catholic University of Honduras in 2000 and a master’s degree in Population and Health with an emphasis on Demography and Health in 2004. She also received a diploma from PAHO’s Leaders in International Health Program in 2009. At the time of her death, she was studying for a diploma in the virtual course on Comprehensive Adolescent Health, IX version, given by the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

This August 20, 2012, begins the Virtual Course Management Mental Health Services whose overall purpose that professionals must take the course to graduate have the skills and abilities to effectively manage mental health services with a view with an emphasis on community and primary care. This may serve the countries involved in having trained managers for process of reform, modernization and decentralization of mental health systems and to reduce the gap between needs and resources. The course is part of the "Strategy and action plan on mental health" of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO / WHO)

On August 3, 2012, the workshop on the Regional Network of Open Educational Resources (REA/OER is the Spanish acronym) successfully concluded at the BIREME headquarters in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The workshop covered the following issues:

From 1 August to 19 December 2012 the College of Américs (COLAM) of the Inter-American Organization (OUI), through the Inter-American Network on Social Determinants of Health (REDET) announce the first edition Diploma in Management of Social Determinants of Health. The training aims to develop skills to manage operations from the perspective of the social determinants of health and achieving equity. Achieving health equity requires recognizing that inequalities exist between people, especially between social groups and more weight in the socially disadvantaged.

The Regional Network for Open Educational Resources (REA/OER) will meet to review and analyze the advances and difficulties in network performance and to exchange experiences on the institutions’ operation of the repository.  The workshop will take place August 1-3, 2012, at the BIREME/Pan American Health Organization / World Health Organization office in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Workshop participants will include those responsible for the country node national repositories and the regional technical team of the Virtual Campus for Public Health (VCPH).   Below is the proposed agenda for the three-day workshop:

Wednesday, August 1

August 16 begin Virtual Course Design and Management of Health Benefits sets that aims to improve the technical skills of the teams that are responsible for the design and ongoing management of health benefit packages in the country of the region.

The Cuban Ministry  of  Public Health has  the  pleasure to  invite you to  take part  of  the Health  International  Convention to  take place on December 3-5th, 2012, at Palacio de  las Convenciones, Havana, Cuba.

The Convention, sponsored by prestigious international organization, expects to make an analysis of the Cuban health conditions and the rest of the world. This meeting will be a space for deep reflections, committed and oriented to discuss themes related to health international agenda where participants will be able to exchange their experiences.

The Edmundo Granda Ugalde Leaders in International Health Program (LIHP) 2012 held a meeting from 28 May – 1 June, 2012 in Managua, Nicaragua. This meeting represents the second module of the nine-month LIHP which is primarily conducted virtually. In attendance were 37 participants from 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries as well as the LIHP mentors and coordinators for the learning modules, the LIHP coordination, PAHO/WHO staff from the PAHO/WHO Country Office in Nicaragua and participants from previous cohorts of the LIHP in Nicaragua.

On days 3 and May 4, held an evaluation meeting, restructuring and rescheduling of the virtual course of Essential Public Health Functions.

This meeting was held in Bogota and included the participation of most of the tutors of the course, academic coordinator, Dr. Ruben Dario Gomez, officials Virtual Campus of Public Health and the draft Human Resources for Health area Health Systems based on PHC.

Recently Team Virtual Campus of Public Health in collaboration with ITS Team Headquarters in WDC, users got PAHO Staff can enter all the contents of the Virtual Campus with PAHO username and password.

With this new technological development, the Virtual Campus of Public Health is successful the last link in the user authentication in various systems on campus.

This means that from this time members of staff from PAHO, to enter the Portal and the Virtual Classroom of the VCPH must use the username and password you have in the organization.

Course Starts call Virtual Gender and Health, as part of Diversity and Rights Hurmanos 2012 (version 2) that aims to initiate a regional continuing education on gender and health through the Virtual Campus of Public Health (VCPH), in order to improve access to partners and counterparts PAHO information, evidence and tools, exchange experiences and build networks of cooperation enabling them to progressively integrate gender perspectives in the field of health.

Available now call for the Virtual Course Essential Public Health Functions 2012 (version 3). This course aims to develop the management skills of the Essential Public Health (EPHF) to help strengthen national health systems and improving health conditions of the population.

Already started the Self-Learning Course of Access Management Resources and Social Networking in the Virtual Classroom of the Virtual Campus of Public Health from the Panamerican Health Organization in order to acquire the concepts, principles and foundations of scientific information.

Upon completion of this work, you will be able to:

Specialization starts: Health Management for Older in its 2012!

This specialization in its 5th version starts in April and is proposed as a space for reflection and capacity building to improve programs and services aimed at older adults in Latin America and the Caribbean.

During the development of specialization, will have the continued assistance and support from their tutors, which will serve as a framework and guidance for further workin the management of programs and services.

Starts Training of Trainers Course for Physicians with a focus on Primary Health Carein its 2012!

Approaches, guidelines and practices in medical education have been renewed over time, living, often in contradictory ways, with approaches and practices. Have also been renovated and transformed the health needs of populations and changed thevery organization of health services. It is then necessary to rethink and reorientapproaches training practices of professionals serving the health needs and to the very transformation of health care.

In late February 2012 the team of the Virtual Campus of Public Health implemented a singleauthentication service that allows users to access all sites and classrooms with a single user account.

So if you have an account created in the Portal Regional, Regional or  Countries Virtual Classroom may enter the same username and password. Additionally the user account onthe Virtual Classroom PAHO Staff can access other sites with your account of PAHO.

On this graph you can see how the user interacts with the authentication server:

In mid-February 2012 successfully completed the migration of Virtual Public Health Campus to a newserver PAHO has pestaciones best in performance, security, bandwidth and speed which will givethe user a better experience to navigate through our portals and virtual classrooms.

Along with the server migration were updated versions of Drupal and Moodle platforms to their latest versions, giving users some advantages in using the systems.

With the migration has changed the addresses to your official domain, shorter and easier to remember.

Next we show some examples of changes in the VCPH web addresses:

The Global Health Program at the University of Chile invites you to participate in the Course of Social Justice and Public Health in Chile on Santiago, Chile from June 25 to July 7, 2012.

Combining classroom instruction with visits to grassroots or-ganizations, clinics and social justice historical sites, this 2-week intensive course will introduce undergraduate and gradu-ate students to the basics of global public health and social justice from a Chilean perspective.

Students will have the opportunity to learn from Chilean and American faculty about current issues in health and equity, and learn the skills to advocate for social justice and human rights in health.

Topics will include:

The Public Health Agency of Canada’s (PHAC) Skills Online Program received the Silver Canadian Award for Training Excellence in the eLearning category at the 2011 Canadian Society for Training and Development's (CSTD) Conference and Trade show.