Capacity building for non communicable disease prevention and control in Latin America and Caribbean: Advances and challenges

The Collaborative Action for Risk Factor Prevention and Effective Management of NCDs (CARMEN) is a network of 30 member states, international networks, several international institutions, and nongovernmental organizations. This initiative strives to promote collaboration to tackle the increasing burden of disease due to chronic non communicable diseases (NCDs).

CARMEN school is a special project created in 2004 that includes series of training and public health activities for strengthening public health response to NCDs in Latin American countries. It fosters partnership between Schools or Departments of Public Health, public health agencies, and Ministries of Health (MOH) at the country level. Currently, CARMEN school includes 27 courses in 14 countries, with over 800 professionals participating.

In 2010, the network performed a study on needs for capacity building among 156 professionals working as country NCD coordinators or collaborators from universities, government sectors, and consultants (response rate of 72%). Their perceived gaps are in the following competencies ranked by priority: Epidemiology of NCDs, biostatistics, monitoring & evaluation; negotiations skills; multi-sector collaboration; program management; social marketing; communication; and use of informatics technology.

To improve those competencies and diversify education modalities (access to resources in the countries such as basic software, access to internet, and PC was reported at 95% and to specialized software and video conference over 60%), the new syllabus for long-distance courses was developed and promoted together with previous modalities, using the platform of Virtual Campus of Pan American Health Organization. Besides long-distance courses, the existing Hybrid courses and “face-to-face” will be kept and promoted as self-development and training at work.