The George Pompidou Hospital (HEGP) and the DSF collaborate on a telemedicine project in Burkina Faso

Since June 2005, at the HEGP, a number of professors are offering a medicine course for health workers, broken down into three modules: capacity-building regarding decisions on diagnosis and medical treatment protocol, vaccination, and the use of the tri-therapies for HIV positive pregnant women. What is so different about their course? The teachers, one from the North, the other from West Africa, work in a pair. They were co-opted in France, Switzerland and Canada and have long experience with Africa. They teach from a recording studio set up in the Paris hospital, while their students listen to them – and can see them – from Ouagadougou and Bamako. Between breaks, the local health workers formulate their questions by email, and the answers come back online, relayed by satellite.

This online education program, targeting local healthcare centres personnel, is a component of the Project HOPES1, currently developed in two cities – the capitals of Burkina Faso and Mali – before being extended to nine other African capitals. «The first results of this experience show that telemedicine and online education can benefit disadvantaged populations», points out Dr. Line Kleinebreil, Coordinator of the Project HOPES. «However, the courses must be followed by real medical practice. If not, 80% of the teaching is lost» This is why the second component of the project involves installing a health surveillance network. The trained health worker can use a «digital kit» in his workplace to keep in touch with the training centre. He can thus maintain his level of qualification, have access to the protocols which were taught, and collaborate with a medical surveillance network : the UNFM2 warning system. When the health worker observes a symptom, a case of diarrhoea for example, he enters is in a software which then indicates the treatment protocol.

If the identified cases reach a certain threshold, an alarm is triggered, so that medical authorities can be immediately informed. And if an epidemic is recorded – thanks to the use of information technologies – there is a direct flow of information between the field and the medical authorities in the capital.

For Dr. Line Kleinebreil, the project needs to expand: «The idea is to enable local communities to benefit from the training modules. Thanks to information technologies, we can multiply the classrooms». It is within this framework that the collaboration between the DSF and the Hospital George Pompidou comes in. The AIDESTI3 project supported by the DSF in Burkina Faso will be able to benefit from the HOPES project and, in return, the DSF will avail to the HOPES project the same technical infrastructure put in place for the AIDESTI project.