Emergencies and severe illness

• WHO SEARO

  • Training materials also adapted for Myanmar and Timor-Leste

  • The adapted Quick Check+ has become the training curricula has become the training program for severe acute respiratory infections including COVID-19 in WHO SEARO.

  • The most recent was developed with WHO Southeast Asian Regional Office (SEARO) concentrating on COVID-19 and other severe acute respiratory infections. The SEARO adaptation of the WHO IMAI District Clinician Manual and Quick Check+ training tools were initiated in February 2020:  to address clinical management of (SARI):

    • to reduce patient mortality during outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Infections (SARI); 

    • to improve IPC for clinicians, to help health workers safely provide clinical care and avoid amplification in health facilities; and 

    • to strengthen the clinician’s role in surveillance and response, to support early recognition of priority pathogens with epidemic potential, particularly those causing SARI. 

  Plans were rapidly modified and expanded to address COVID-19 management, both clinical management and infection prevention and control. 

  Whereas the SEARO version of the Course Director Guide was originally planned to guide 5-day on-site training for clinical teams (including clinicians, auxiliaries, and managers/administrators), the COVID-19 pandemic required rapid modification of training plans to support remote training. To support this, a guide for a crash course for COVID-19 using distance learning was developed and remote Zoom training was conducted with clinicians and, in Myanmar, also with managers/administrators. All participants had the participant training manuals and were assigned sections to read and exercises. Powerpoints were developed to summarize the content and present exercises. The drills and case studies were discussed with facilitators in small break-out groups.  See Resources for a complete listing of the WHO SEARO SARI tools.

  To substitute for on-site skill stations, videos were identified, both from OpenWHO,  YouTube videos from university sites and plans were made for facilitators or other senior clinicians to help particpants practice clinical skills in their hospital. All participants had access to the OpenWHO powerpoint courses and WHO COVID-19 clinical and IPC guidelines which each country used to rapidly adapt and issues within their own COVID-19 clinical/IPC national guidelines. Keeping up with these evolving guidelines required multiple revisions of the training materials to guarantee consistency.  

WHO Searo Adaptation Resources