Team Sager and IMC^® complete second program in Afghanistan

On September 1, 2009, a year after the project initiation, International Medical Corps (IMC)® and Sager Family Traveling Foundation and Roadshow have successfully implemented a full course of Community Health and Leadership Training for Female Health Professionals in Afghanistan.

In 2002 Sager Family Traveling Foundation and Roadshow partnered with IMC® to address the severe shortage of adequately trained healthcare professionals in Afghanistan. Health care professionals in Afghanistan must, under the Ministry of Public Health’s National Healthy Policy, implement the Basic Package of Health Services. However, the majority of these healthcare professionals were never adequately trained to effectively put the package into practice nor help their patients, especially women of child-bearing age and children under five years old.

In order to bridge that gap and impact lots of people around the country IMC® and Sager Family Traveling Foundation and Roadshow created a program to train “Master Trainers” who would then go and train local community healthcare workers in their local villages.

This most recent yearlong program 14 Master Trainers were instructed in areas ranging from pre- and post-natal care and infectious diseases to effective teaching skills and management and community leadership. After graduation from the training course, these Master Trainers conducted seminars for 76 community healthcare workers (64 female and 12 male) in Maidan-Wardak, Logar, Nangarhar, and Kabul provinces. After their training courses, the 76 community healthcare workers trained 2-3 other local healthcare professionals bringing the total up to 209.

The average class score for each post-training test was 89% to 99%, with improvements of between 67 to 79 percentage points on each test.

For more information and to read the full report please click here.

© 2009 International Medical Corps®