About Us

As a WHO Centre, the Centre has a twofold mission: firstly, to augment the WHO’s efforts in improving digital health competencies and capacities of the global health workforce, and secondly, to scale the global health workforce’s adoption of digital tools in pre-service and in-service education and training.

In this, the Centre wholeheartedly dedicates itself to building evidence for and demonstrating the uses of digital health education - discovering what works, when, why, for whom, by what mechanisms, at what intensity and the cost of digital education interventions. The work will help inform key decision-makers in the astute use of digital health and health education for pre-service and in-service education and training across all health professions.​

An Urgent Global Challenge

A UN Commission on health employment and economic growth reports that the world will face a global shortage of 18 million health workers by 2030. The present problems with the education of health professions are also well-documented, not least in the severe shortage of teaching staff and inconsistency of education quality.​ Embracing digital health education to empower the health workforce is one of the key approaches that can tackle this enormous challenge. As tackled in this latest WHO publication, “Digital Education for Building Health Workforce Capacity”, the current evidence landscape suggests that digital education methods can be as effective as self-directed or face-to-face training, while the spread of modalities such as virtual reality is leading to better cost effectiveness in technology adoption.