Strengthening Family Medicine Services In Armenia

Through the USAID-funded Primary Health Care Reform (PHCR) Project, IntraHealth and Armenia's Ministry of Health (MOH) are working to improve the country's family medicine program. IntraHealth, along with the MOH, the World Bank, and other PHCR stakeholders, recently developed a family nursing curriculum and a cardiovascular disease training package for doctors.

Family Nurse Training
This spring the Project is launching training activities in rural marzes using the Unified Family Nursing Curriculum (UFNC), a continuing education program that provides 35 training modules with a special focus on patient education and healthy lifestyle issues. As a modular teaching method the UFNC is well suited to problem-based learning and self-instruction and provides trainees a way of learning while employed.

PHCR will use the UFNC to train 130 rural primary health care nurses over a six and a half month time period. These nurses will participate in classroom training for a week per month in Gyumri and Vanadzor regional nursing colleges. PHCR-supported trainers will provide clinical skills training at health care stations within each trainee's health posting. Upon successful completion of the course the trainees will obtain nationally recognized qualifications as family nurses or, for rural health post nurses, community nurses. As health post nurses are often the only primary health care providers in rural Armenia, this program is an important step toward improving the quality of medical care.

Family Physician training
A working group of Project staff, practicing cardiologists, family medical staff from Yerevan State Medical University and National Institute of Health employees are developing the first of several training packages for family physicians—the "Cardiovascular Diseases" module. This training package includes trainers' and trainees' guides and manuals, lecture handouts, audio-visual aids, and knowledge and skills assessment tools. The training focuses on evidence-based medicine standards and provides teaching and assessment tools that enable competency-based learning and problem-based learning methodologies. The package includes patient education materials to improve behavior change counseling and communication skills.

The Project will develop similar physician training packages on a variety of other topics including: health promotion and disease prevention, diabetes, neurology, dermatology and chronic lung diseases, among others. By standardizing physicians' training materials and teaching methods, the Project expects to improve medical practice standards and the practice of family medicine throughout Armenia.

A five-year project (2005–2010), PHCR is funded by the US Agency for International Development and led by Emerging Markets Group, Ltd. (EMG).