Technical assistance to the Kyrgyz Postgraduate Medical Education Institute on Learning Management System for continuous medical professional education

Location: Kyrgyzstan  |  Funded by: KfW

Key objectives:

• Development of technical specifications and installation of LMS, and the development of methodology for online learning material and delivery of selected online courses. The purpose of the national LMS is to deliver training/learning to a large number of health workers who are geographically dispersed in various parts of the country.
• To work with the Kyrgyz Postgraduate Medical Education Institute (KPMEI) to understand the country and health sector context.
• To develop an LMS that was not limited to online courses but also involved blended learning, delivery of clinical vignettes, clinical guidelines, quizzes, and information nuggets.
• At the initial stage, to ensure that the LMS covered primary care physicians, in subsequent steps scaling to include health workers in the entire health system, including physicians, nurses, and pharmacists.

Project description: The project aimed to help the MoH of Kyrgyz to establish a national Learning Management System (LMS) to support the capacity development of medical staff. This followed the World Bank’s multiple meetings and workshops with various stakeholders as part of the preparation and implementation of its Primary Health Care Quality Improvement Program (PHCQIP) that identified the following critical issues regarding the capacity building of health workers:

a) substantial clinical knowledge gaps among primary care physicians,

b) variable quality of CPD learning delivered,

c) limited access to CPD outside two major cities due to travel and opportunity costs,

d) limited information on the effectiveness of CPD learning delivered, and

e) limited local expertise and resources to build and scale LMS and quality clinical content.