Professional Development  Program for Higher Education Project/Medical Education

The third major component of the Higher Education Project – Medical Education (HEP-ME) is aiming towards improved teaching methods and professional development at Kabul Medical University (KMU) and provincial medical schools.  To achieve this objective, HEP-ME established a committee at KMU in April 2010.  This committee is called the Instructional Enhancement (IE) Committee and it is regularly meeting since its establishment. 
 
HEP-ME, in close collaboration with the IE Committee, has identified materials for the conduction of workshops on effective teaching methodologies.  These materials include JHPIEGO’s course package on Effective Teaching and some other content-specific teaching resources in medical education.  HEP-ME’s strategy is to identify a national pool of key trainers in medical education from KMU and six provincial schools; these key trainers will be trained in new teaching methodologies. Field visits will be planned and separate meetings will be held with the deans of provincial medical schools to identify appropriate key trainers. After they are trained, national key trainers will have two approaches for conducting similar workshops to other faculty members at KMU and provincial medical schools: 1) conducting separate IE sessions or separate modules at KMU according to a weekly calendar (disbursed delivery); 2) conducting full IE workshops in provinces (mass delivery). The first workshop delivery approach (disbursed delivery) can also be adopted at provincial medical schools who feel that they cannot have all their teachers attending a workshop at once. 
 
Presenting/modeling new teaching methodologies will also be an integrated part of other project activities, for instance, modeling new teaching methods during short courses on public health.  This approach will continue in other project activities such as in English and computer courses, working in clinical rotation and working with KMU School of Nursing. 
 
In the longer run, HEP-ME will also be working to develop standards and expectations or requirements for professional development (as part of the Global Standards for Quality Improvement in Basic Medical Education). HEP-ME will be providing a Dari version of WFME (World Federation for Medical Education) Global Standards for Quality Improvement in Basic Medical Education for Afghanistan.  Different working groups will be assigned under the IE Committee to work on different areas of the WFME Global Standards for Quality Improvement in Basic Medical Education, i.e. adaptation of WFME standards for Afghanistan.