Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD (March 24, 2015)
In March, a one day HINARI workshop was conducted at Johns Hopkins University, a U.S. based University, that like Tulane University has significant history as public health institutions with numerous global health projects. These institutions are similar in breath to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine or Antwerp School of Tropical Medicine. The second workshop was hosted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Welsh Library. Peggy Gross coordinated the workshop, Donna Hesson assisted and both served as facilitators. Also Jean Sacks assisted as a facilitator.
The target audiences for this 2nd workshop was identical to the initial program - Johns Hopkins faculty, staff and students who have linkages with HINARI eligible institutions, will be visiting eligible institutions, or have contact with students from eligible institutions and particularly students who will be returning to eligible institutions after completing advanced degrees.
The program included three 90 minute sessions that focused on Basic HINARI (Background about R4L programs, HINARI portal, HINARI PubMed), Advanced HINARI (e-book resources, health information on the Internet, brief overview of evidence based practice resources), Zotero reference management software and HINARI and R4L training tools. Similarly to the 1st workshop, all the material was placed in a Dropbox folder and those that attended the 1st two sessions received a certificate.
45+ participants attended the 1st two sessions with 35 for the 3rd one. The composition of this group was predominantly Masters in Public Health students - many who will have projects/internships in R4L eligible countries and several from R4L eligible countries including three Fogarty Fellowship scholars studying Medical Ethics for 3 1/2 months (from Uganda, Botswana and Zambia), four 'informationists' from Welsh Library and the librarian from the Wilmer Eye Institute.
All the material was well received by the various groups although most of the presentations were overviews with the limited training time. Some of the (expected) byproducts were participants discussing further collaborations or communication with a new colleague.
One outcome is the recognition that HINARI training should be conducted every six months. Several faculty members could not attend as they were on overseas assignments in R4L registered institutions. Similarly to the 1st workshop, there is a need for follow-up with the participants particularly to develop distance learning courses for JHPEIGO staff in eligible countries and a subset of a network of international ophthalmology librarians from eligible countries plus training assistance from two individuals who will be working in Haiti and Myanmar.