Note: This is part three of a three-part series on why we train local people in developing nations to provide basic therapy services for people with disabilities in their own communities. The series follows the steps I take as a physical therapist when I evaluate a patient. If you’ve missed the previous blogs, click here for the first blog: Creating The Problem List, and here for the second blog: The Assessment.

Now that we had identified the problems and assessed the plan, we began a new plan to create a written curriculum to consistently train people in developing nations in how to provide basic physical therapy and other rehabilitation services for people with disabilities in their community. We were testing our first course manual when the pandemic hit. Everything shut down around the world and we all waited to see what would happen. What would we do? 

I had no doubt we still needed to train people in local communities, but doing it all in person takes time. With this extra time while our classes were closed, we were given an opportunity to pause, assess, and come up with another plan. As I participated in many online and virtual events, I wondered if we should change from written manuals to a video-based curriculum. We still needed in-person trainings, but some of the information could be shared in a video format to review before the course and later, as desired by the student.

 As we thought about and prayed over this plan, it seemed to make sense and answered some questions and concerns I had with our current plan. By creating a video curriculum, we could do the following:

1. Consistently train others and give them an easy resource for reviewing information;
2. Train people that struggle more with reading and writing;
3. Easily involve others in the work, whether short-term or long-term, by having them watch the same videos our rehabilitation promoters would watch and then help with the in-person classes to review concepts and practice different skills. 

We also discovered that creating videos helped us further pinpoint and narrow down what and how we wanted to share this content with others. Our trial run with the COVID-19 video course appeared successful and now we continue to work on our first course: Introduction to Community-based Rehabilitation And Basic Skills For Rehabilitation Promoters. We have a system in place and continue to work our current plan. We’re excited to see the progress, even though it has taken longer than we’d like. Although we can’t share all the videos with you here, here are a few pictures of some of the things our rehabilitation promoters will learn to do through this course:

Define community-based rehabilitation, including the five parts.  

Demonstrate what they can and cannot do as a rehabilitation promoter.

Assess their perspective of people with disabilities and describe how that affects their work as a rehabilitation promoter. 

As with any plan, there will be some revisions on the way, but we keep making steps forward and look forward to seeing how our first class will like this new format.