Can tech train the doctors the world so desperately needs?

The pandemic has shone a spotlight on a crisis that the World Health Organisation (WHO) wrote about in 2016: the global shortage of healthcare professionals. By 2030, the WHO estimates there will be an international shortfall of approximately 18 million healthcare workers. Of all the supply chain crises the pandemic has exacerbated this is perhaps one of the most acute. It isn’t an issue that exclusively faces resource-poor settings. In January 2021, the United Kingdom deployed 400 military personnel to staff an overwhelmed civilian healthcare service.

To meet the required number of healthcare workers, the world must triple the rate at which it trains medics. However, in addition to facing a shortfall of healthcare professionals, we face “severe institutional shortages” when it comes to training healthcare professionals, as explained by Prof Julio Frenk and colleagues in The Lancet. Even worse, the WHO highlights that 11 countries on the continent of Africa have no medical schools at all.

Simply put: we don’t have enough medical schools to keep training healthcare workers in the same way.

Whilst the pandemic may have exacerbated the issue, it may also have enabled the healthcare sector to move towards a solution – collaborative virtual learning. Online learning has made it possible to train healthcare professionals at scale, and interestingly it has also fostered greater knowledge sharing in the healthcare community. One of the organisations at the forefront of this virtual healthcare training revolution is MedAll, who closed their second fundraising round in October 2021. It was led by some of Europe’s leading investment firms including Connect, Seedcamp, Nina Capital, TechStart and Ascension. In just 6 months, MedAll has powered virtual healthcare training for over 700 healthcare organisations and has helped healthcare professionals to learn in 166 countries. The company was featured as a “breakout start up” at the WebSummit annual conference in Lisbon in November 2021.

It was founded by Dr Phil McElnay – a surgeon by training – who announced on Thursday 4th November 2021 at Web Summit that the company was making their virtual healthcare training technology completely open access for healthcare organisations around the world. McElnay explained more about the company’s mission: ‘With a requirement to scale up the international healthcare workforce so rapidly, I realised something needed to be done urgently. We founded MedAll with the aim of enabling equitable access to healthcare training for every healthcare professional – everywhere. The risk of us doing nothing was just too
high: patients would suffer.”

MedAll helps organisations to deliver – and share – their healthcare training across the globe using virtual, hybrid and on-demand training technology. One such organisation, the Association of Surgeons in Training (ASiT), ran their annual pre-conference training courses in partnership with MedAll this year, which saw delegates from over 50 countries join to learn new surgical techniques – from their own homes.

McElnay continues: “What’s interesting is that as well as large organisations such as ASiT using the tool, MedAll has also witnessed an unintended revolution in the peer-to-peer education space. Junior doctors and medical students have joined together to share their knowledge in organised groups, outside the boundaries of formal medical education pathways. One such group of junior doctors is “The 6pm Series”, who have taught 14,000 healthcare professionals over the last 6 months, at 6pm every day – all using MedAll.”

Dr Phil McElnay spoke about the potential of MedAll: “With over one third of UK medical students having attended sessions powered by MedAll in the last 6 months, we can see the potential for this technology to truly scale the number of healthcare professionals we can train as a society. And we are just getting going. Today’s announcement that we are giving healthcare organisations open access to our virtual healthcare education system means that together we may actually be able to hit the WHO target of training 18 million more healthcare professionals by 2030.”

As we witness the impact the pandemic has had on the global healthcare system, the case for rethinking how we train our healthcare professionals has never been stronger. The team at MedAll believe their technology may hold some of the answers.

McElnay concludes: “MedAll enables a whole new level of crowdsourcing and collaboration in medical education. We may just be able to solve the healthcare professional supply problem. It is exactly the sort of large-scale, collaborative innovation the internet was invented for.”