Preamble:

With the view to bringing the United Nations into the 21st Century and to accelerating development throughout the changing world, in September 2000 Heads of State gathered at the UN and ushered in the millennium by adopting the UN Millennium Declaration. Endorsed by 189 countries, the Declaration was translated into a roadmap setting up goals, now known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), to be reached by the year 2015.

The MDGs agreed on eight major goals, which subsume 18 subsidiary targets and 48 indicators, that represent real needs and international commitments to tackle and reduce poverty, hunger, ill-health, gender inequality, lack of education, lack of clean water, and environmental degradation. It is evident that such a people-based and socially relevant programme concerns the health sciences and the health profession in an extensive way, and indeed the health component of the MDGs is particularly important in the overalll effort, cutting across many of the varied goals and targets. To meet the commitments, therefore, the health professions and the international community must ensure the necessary education, training, skills and organizational capacities, if the goals are to be achieved by 2015. The present proposal for an educational

programme is based on this premise.

Vision:

The purpose of this project is to enable academic institutions that train health sciences students to develop an educational strategy on MDG training and education for health professional trainees. This strategy needs to reflects the values, ethos, and pathos behind the MDGs, and can be flexibly adapted into the educational institutions’ existing curriculum. Over time, this strategy will lead to an increase in students’ attitude, knowledge, and skills in MDG implementation, increase in trainers/faculty members, and an evaluation framework that demonstrate this strategy’s output and contributions to achieving the MDG targets by 2015 and beyond.

The Issue:

MDGs, successfully agreed upon with consensus in 2000, have less than optimal uptake in education and training by academic institutions based on a 2005 survey of NGOs. It is important to engage academic institutions as educational partner for MDG training to build capacity, accelerate knowledge translation, and help transform the next generation of health professionals to espouse the MDG values in their future practices. In order to meet and appropriately respond to societal needs, Health sciences education needs to not only produce competent health professionals, but also imbue in them the values of professionalism, ethics, human rights law, and team based practice towards patient centered care. In the global picture, achieving the MDGs is very much in synchrony with all these values and thus synergize very well with health sciences training and education

The Inititave:

The United Nations Millennium Declaration in 2000 laid the foundation for the ground breaking 189 countries’ consensus on the 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with 18 subsidiary targets and 48 indicators. Attention towards dissemination, education and training of the MDGs is importantly needed as a 2005 survey of NGOs indicated less than optimal awareness and uptake of MDGs amongst academic institutions.

In order to meet the 2015 MDG targets and enlist the academic institutions that provide health professional training to participate in the education and training of MDGs, and also use this opportunity to imbue global values of professionalism, ethics, and social responsibility in the health professionals of tomorrow, we propose to develop an educational strategy on MDG training for adoption and flexible implementation into the curriculum of the health professional training programme. This strategy not only highlights the MDGs and their corresponding targets and indicators and how they came to be, but also engages the students to envision how their own global and local endeavours contribute to the ethos and attainment of the MDGs for the benefits of all global citizens. In turn, this educational strategy will also help document the efforts and activities amongst the global academic institutions towards the 2015 MDG targets through an UN MDG oriented evaluation framework.