Update from the WPA Secretary for Education

The year 2020 has been most challenging. The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected the physical and mental health of virtually everyone in the world. There is an anticipated increased demand for mental health care. However, given the limited mental health capacities around the world, especially in low- and middle-income countries, this will imply that more people with mental health problems will be deprived of optimal care1-5. In the current triennium, one of the items of the WPA Action Plan6 is to enhance the mental health capacities around the world. Education and training in evidence-based clinical knowledge and skills are essential to achieve this goal. With Internet and smartphone technologies gaining popularity worldwide, the WPA Secretary for Education's work plans have also focused more on Internet-based education. The WPA has been recently able to purchase a licence for a learning management platform (known as the “LMS”), reorganize and update some of its many existing educational materials, recruit a part-time educational coordinator, and develop several new online educational modules for the LMS with the kind support from experts in various Association's components. The availability of these modules in the WPA educational portal – accessible on the Association's website (www.wpanet.org) – provides mental health professionals around the globe (especially those in low- and middle-income countries) with new opportunities to learn and to update their psychiatric knowledge and skills. In particular, we have been able to develop modules on several vital topics – some examples being telepsychiatry, intimate partner vio­lence, and basic psychotherapy. Such enhancement of knowledge and skills will hopefully translate into enhanced mental health capacity and improved access to care by patients, especially in underserved populations. Within days of launching the system, more than 1,000 psychiatrists registered to access our learning materials (more than double our initial technical subscription). More than 3,000 website visitors read WPA news stories related to the educational portal and close to 4,000 viewed the educational portal webpage. The profile of registered users is vast, with close to 50 countries represented from right across the globe. It has become quickly clear that the WPA educational portal will be vital to our future work and to that of our 145 Member Societies and our mental health partners. We are eager to maintain the momentum created during this launch phase and to build on it to ensure a valuable and sustainable resource well into the future. In the coming year, the WPA would also like to further develop and expand the number of educational materials available, commission new materials on evolving areas and issues, expand the search functionality and language capability of the system, refine the registration process, and diversify the information gathered. Apart from didactic learning through the modules available in the WPA educational portal, experiential learning is obviously important to enhance the translation of clinical knowledge into actual skills in patient care. In this respect, an important ongoing development is the further rollout of the WPA volunteering programme7. Due to travel restrictions related to COVID-19, online volunteering will be the main focus in the year 2021. Through face-to-face interaction with expert volunteers online, participants from host organizations will benefit from real-time lectures, Q & A sessions, role play of clinical skills, and supervisory feedback on their clinical performance. Given the potential benefits to the volunteers and their hosts, this educational initiative has been upgraded to become the target of one of the WPA Action Plan's work groups. Comprised of experts on volunteering from different countries, this work group has just prepared guidelines and recommendations on the attributes of expert volunteers, the roles and responsibilities of the volunteering and host organizations, and the advisory and supportive roles played by the WPA. The work group is now planning to conduct a pilot volunteering project with an aim of field-testing and fine-tuning the practical logistics, and evaluating the effectiveness and satisfaction with the project. These exciting developments will soon be available on the website of the WPA.