Saudi-Pak The EduCast Platform To Train 1,500 Afghan Doctors

IsDB recently approved $180,000 for platform’s eDoctors programme as part of its technical assistance grant for establishing cutting-edge online health education centres in Afghanistan.

Saudi-Pak The EduCast Platform To Train 1,500 Afghan Doctors

As the programme received funding from the Islamic Development Bank, a Saudi-Pakistani online education platform will begin training more than 1,500 Afghan doctors, according to its CEO, who spoke to Arab News. Educators in Pakistan and Pakistani expatriates in Saudi Arabia are partners in the Karachi-based EduCast platform.

Since its founding in 2016, the EduCast platform has offered services to pilgrims in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Pakistan.

The IsDB recently approved $180,000 for the platform’s eDoctors programme as part of its technical assistance grant for establishing cutting-edge online health education centres in Afghanistan, where the country’s health system is in danger of collapsing due to years of understaffing, underfunding, and inadequate equipment.

Abdullah Butt, the founder and CEO of EduCast, told Arab News on Thursday that his company had received grant assistance from the IsDB to carry out the Afghanistan Medical Education Uplift Program and offer online expert opinion services to Afghan doctors in six Afghan provinces.

EduCast has already established a presence in Afghanistan, where it has been conducting teleconsultations with doctors at the Shefajo Hospital for Women and Children in Kabul since last year.

Through doctor-to-doctor online consultation, online seminars, and on-site training at medical facilities in neighbouring Pakistan, the new programme seeks to train and certify 1,500 Afghan doctors.

In six regional hospitals in Kabul, Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-e Sharif, and Khost, Butt said, “We will set up telehealth education and clinical support facilities starting from this month.

“The online training program will be followed by in-person training for one or two months in Pakistan’s hospitals in Peshawar, Karachi and Islamabad in key health-related areas of high demand, including maternal and neonatal child health, and infectious and non-communicable diseases.”

Since many international aid organisations left the country after the Taliban took power in 2021, the situation for doctors practising in Afghanistan has gotten worse.

They lack ongoing training in their specialised fields. According to Butt, “establishing telemedicine and e-health as national platforms has been suggested to improve overall health care service delivery since medical universities in Afghanistan do not provide CME-related programmes.

After international donor organisations withdrew from Afghanistan, the IsDB-funded project identified the provision of health care services as a remedy for the negative effects of economic and political instability.

Approximately 1,200 doctors from around the world have joined the eDoctors programme since it launched in 2019. Since then, EduCast estimates that it has offered e-health services and counselling to more than 4.4 million patients.