![]() The contribution of this paper is to describe a novel and innovative partnership between an academic department of emergency medicine and a humanitarian nonprofit to provide a virtual training curriculum during a burgeoning pandemic, and to assess the impact of participation in the course on knowledge gains within core competencies related to COVID-19. Pandemic-related issues addressed by the Project HOPE® curriculum include triage systems, inventory of critical resources, creation, and implementation of surge sites for patient care. The need for virtual training has been paramount in health and medical education since the start of the pandemic, and virtual learners have reported feeling empowered and efficient amidst the uncertainties of a global emergency of this magnitude. This course was one of the first virtual, large scale, comprehensive training available on a wide range of key COVID-19 topics. COVID-19 disease has a wide range of clinical presentation, and the rapid increase in patients requiring healthcare due to exponential community spread of SARS-CoV-2 has resulted in a dire need for careful allocation of scarce resources and the utilization of surge capacity protocols. The novelty of SARS-CoV-2 and evolving knowledge of the virus emphasizes the importance of educating the healthcare workforce on how best to respond to its pandemic spread. The knowledge and expertise of academic institutions and researchers combined with the ability of the humanitarian organization to scale up established partnerships to disseminate education make such partnerships ideal for efficient programming, particularly in pandemic response situations. Prior disasters have highlighted that partnerships between academic and humanitarian organizations can disseminate information rapidly. Striving to meet the demand for training on this novel illness, Project HOPE®, an international humanitarian organization that works around the world, partnered with faculty from Brown University to create and disseminate a remote, virtual training-of-trainers (TOT) course aimed at strengthening knowledge of key COVID-19 characteristics and control principles in healthcare stakeholders. The unprecedented global strain caused by COVID-19 has required innovative and rapid solutions to multifactorial challenges in education. Evolving knowledge and limited training of frontline workers is a barrier to pandemic response. Since late 2019, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)’s disease (COVID-19) quickly stressed health systems and overwhelmed resources at a local and global level. ![]()
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December 2022
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