Continuing Medical Education on a Stick: Nepal as a Test Bed

摘要

The imbalance of health workforce between rural and urban has the most severe impact in low-income countries (LICs). One of the key elements in this disparity is the lack of professional development opportunities, such as Continuing Medical Education (CME), for rural medical practitioners. There exist few useful tools to effectively bridge the paucity of resources and access to CME for rural health care workers. Focusing on Nepal as a test-bed, we build, deploy, and evaluate an ICT-based platform called CMES (CME on a Stick), for the delivery and sharing of affordable and high-quality CME content for rural medical practitioners. We also refine the Citizen-centric Capacity Development (CCD) framework for ICT4D (Information and Communication Technology for Development). The CCD framework guided the development and evaluation of the CMES platform. The research contributes not only to the theoretical knowledge of linking ICT design and achievement of development goals, but also the practical knowledge of building ICT-based CME capacity for rural areas in LICs.