Welcome to the website of the Erasmus+ Project HITIHE!

Project

This project aims to build up the capacity of two specific Higher Education Institution support services, the techno-pedagogical staff and the health librarians. These two groups will act as catalysators to stimulate the adoption of innovative techno-pedagogical techniques by academic staff in their teaching.  They will also help building up a network of skilled health care experts via the development of open access platforms and supporting teaching and academic staff in sharing resources through these platforms. This will lead to an improved quality of Health Science education and, ultimately, to improved healthcare in South-East Asia.

As part of the HITIHE project modules were made by health librarians to aid students and staff in identifying and working with academic literature. Furthermore, a module was developed on how to submit a journal to the Cambodian Journal of Public Health, an open access journal developed within the framework of the HITIHE project. Health library vision statements were developed to direct focus within each library.

Three platforms were developed and/or integrated within the framework of the HITIHE project. If you want to know more, you can click here or find them under platforms.

WikiTropica

Moodle NIPH

MEDBOX

EPI-SMART

Objectives

Rationale

Focus on neglected tropical diseases

The impact of the lack of access to high-quality and regionally-relevant health information in Low-and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) is especially important for the case of (neglected) tropical and infectious diseases as LMICs are where most of the disease burden occurs. 1,5 billion people needed mass or individual treatment and care for neglected tropical diseases in 2016 and these diseases disproportionally affect socio-economically disadvantaged groups (UN, 2018). Outbreaks of infectious and zoonotic diseases in Cambodia and Indonesia are multiplying, as exemplified by recent avian influenza and Nipah virus outbreaks. Antimicrobial resistance due to over-use of antiobiotics is rising and multidrug-resistant malaria or tuberculosis strains are common in Cambodia. Indonesia has seen several natural disasters in recent years, followed by an increase in infectious disease outbreaks such as diarrhoea, skin rashes, tuberculosis and cholera. There is therefore a need to provide health information focused infectious and (neglected) tropical diseases. Travel health will also be a topic, as an increasing number of SEA regional travelers can be confronted with infectious disease risks during travel.

Need for qualitatively trained health care professionals

The South-East Asian (SEA) region is predicted to need an additional 4,5 million qualitatively trained healthcare professionals by 2030. WHO (2014) indicates, amongst others, two important elements of workforce development:

• access to information
• quality basic and in-service education. 

Access to up to date, high-quality health information is often fragmented or unavailable (e.g. behind a paywall), also in SEA where this consortium has its focus. Furthermore Health Sciences academic staff, who have the needed scientific expertise, are not spread out evenly and lack ways to transfer their knowledge to a broad group of end-users, such as other teachers, students and healthcare professionals. Still an important scale-up potential exists if we can bundle health information and open up this expertise through innovative, digital information platforms. Developing digital platforms is an affordable and sustainable method in SEA with its fast-developing knowledge-based economy and knowledge-sharing culture. At this moment, only a limited number of such platforms exist. The current platforms are not contextualized for the SEA region in particular or for resource-constrained settings in general. Furthermore, to efficiently use such digital resources or access online learning, healthcare professionals need professional digital and knowledge management skills, which are often lacking at the moment.

Impact

Addressing challenges in Cambodia

In the Cambodian higher education context, increasing student numbers and a growing willingness to invest in quality education are two recent developments. Ford (2015) cites both assuring quality and equitable access as important factors affecting the future of higher education in this phase of rapid growth. He also describes current institutional quality issues. This project supports institutional quality reforms, through the capacity building of two crucial support services. Within Cambodia, this project also reinforces inter-institutional collaboration and public-private partnerships between the University of Health Sciences, National Institute of Public Health and the Institute of Technology Cambodia.

Addressing challenges in Indonesia

In the Indonesian higher education context, the sector has seen a massification of the number of students in higher education institutions, a push for excellence (university rankings) and an enhanced academic freedom. On the other hand, there are a need to further improve quality especially in the field of technology for teaching, learning & training development (Rosser, 2015). This project aims to further reinforce the quality of education and access to information, through capacity building of the two targetted support services. As Universitas Sebelas Maret and Universitas Gadjah Mada already built up considerable research and teaching expertise and are willing to share this knowledge, they are not only receivers, but also will contribute significantly to the workshops. Stimulating South-South capacity-building is important in this project, as it will assure stewardship of the platforms. The international visibility of the excellence of the two Indonesian partners will be an extra stimulus for their sustainable support.

Partners