Global occupational health: Increasing access to occupational health training materials and practice tools

The Global Plan of Action on Workers’ Health 2008-2017 (WHA60.26), urges Member States to develop and strengthen human resources through training, and to provide guidance for the development of basic packages, information products, tools and working methods, and models of good practice for occupational health services. Obstacles to training include lack of in-country programs, access to materials, cost of training, and intellectual property protection of many training materials. The internet provides a mechanism to rapidly access and download digitized training materials for self-instruction or training of others. Under the auspices of the WHO Occupational Health program a global electronic library of training materials and practice tools in occupational and environmental health and a specialty library in road safety have been developed. Key features of this library include: 1) free access; 2) training materials in the public domain; 3) interface in six languages; 4) branching index; and 5) advanced search. Materials are placed in the library through a network of contributing editors, which include WHO Collaborating Centres, national institutes, university programs, and non-governmental organizations in the fields of occupational and environmental health. Examples of training materials include case studies, slideshows, tutorials, course syllabi, and curricula for courses as well as web casts and some on-line courses. Examples of practice tools include fact sheets, criteria documents, data bases, maps, modeling tools, and checklists. There are currently 305 environmental, 850 occupational health and over 200 road safety materials submitted by 17 contributing editors from seven countries. As of June 2008, there have been over 100,000 views of materials in the GeoLibrary. The GeoLibrary is a useful and important database dedicated to occupational and environmental health training materials and practice tools, with the resources found in the GeoLibrary available for educators to use and adapt in their efforts to build capacity locally.