Global Health Education

The Farley Center partnered with the WONCA Working Party on Mental Health to develop and pilot a global curriculum to enable learners to lead practice transformation and be empowered with policy influencing skills to advocate for their patients and promote and enhance primary care mental health.

The initial alpha cohort was held in 2020 and a beta cohort met in 2023-2024. Twenty family doctors from 16 low- and middle-income countries successfully completed the program. Findings from the program evaluation can be found here:

• Advocacy training for young family doctors in primary mental health care: a report and global call to action
• Beta cohort program evaluation (PDF)

Despite initiation at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, this pilot project was successfully implemented with remarkable participant commitment. The structure and operations of the program were confirmed to be feasible. The embedded evaluation provided both important insights for improvement and affirmation that the program was relevant, desired, and acceptable in different countries. The learners formed their own community. Several participants, already in positions of influence, recognized their ability to advocate for policy change.

This project has demonstrated a widespread appetite and ability among young family doctors to integrate mental health and primary care. The intervention was successful in equipping them to spearhead systems changes to this end and would be reproducible in most countries. The international team involved with the Farley Center is actively pursuing funding to expand this project.

iMedtrust was conceived in 2012 to address a critical global challenge: more than one billion people lack access to adequate health care, largely due to severe shortages of appropriately prepared health professionals. These shortages—especially in low-resource settings—are associated with higher rates of premature mortality, family disruption, and constrained economic development, a situation that continues to deteriorate. The World Bank has estimated that the global health workforce must double, from 40 million to 80 million, by 2030 to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Without substantial and sustained intervention, hundreds of millions more people will be adversely affected.

In response, iMedtrust was registered as a charity in England and Wales in 2015, operating until 2026. Its Board of Trustees and International Advisory Board was comprised of leaders in medical education research and development, including Farley Center Senior Scholar Larry Green, MD. Together, they developed a set of innovative, cost-effective, and scalable approaches to health professions education, supported by an economically self-sustaining institutional structure, as outlined in this archive.

Central to this initiative is “Adaptive Medical Education.” This set of approaches involves systematically assessing each learner’s prior experiences, capabilities, and contextual circumstances, then designing individualized learning pathways that continually adapt to each learner's evolving readiness. A novel, economically self-sustaining institutional structure was conceived to facilitate and sustain these approaches.

A principal objective of the iMedtrust model is increasing the likelihood that learners will undertake their preparation and continue their professional practice within their places of origin, thereby contributing to areas of greatest need. This approach also made extensive use of digital technologies to support communication, instruction, program implementation, as well as ongoing program assessment and refinement.

To learn more, download the free, open source iMedtrust curriculum documents.