For 8 years I have been the principal surgical educator, teaching the CNIS program in Northern Uganda. To date over 400 doctors who graduated from the University took the course. The idea of expanding our capabilities to teach through case studies on mobile apps is an exciting innovation. MOST is another step forward introduced by CNIS and supported by Ugandan teachers to the benefit of our students and their patients.

I co-authored the SOO course and have taught it to junior doctors and assistant medical officers in Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania. I have also taught the FIRST course for midwives in Tanzania. These courses have been critical in teaching midwives to safely manage labour, deliveries and patient referral. They have also taught non-physician clinicians the decision-making and technical skills of operative delivery, including c-section. The mobile optimization of these courses will help Canadian teachers work with our African colleagues to address maternal and neonatal mortality in Eastern Africa and throughout the world.

In the past 20 years, CNIS programs have been taught to thousands of learners throughout Ethiopia. I have recently been recommending the CNIS programs to colleagues in West Africa. Through the Medical Education Partnership Initiative, many more students now have access to computers . We are very receptive to having the active learning of CNIS programs on existing hardware. Therefore MOST would be a valuable contribution to the learning of the many Ethiopian students entering the health professions.

I would like to thank everyone at CNIS for introducing FIRST (Fundamental Interventions Referral and Safe Transfer) to the nurse midwifery program at Tanga. FIRST empowers students of in-service and pre-service to be more effective in skills, which is beneficial to the Tanzanian people. Mobile will make it so much easier to reach a lot of students and teach them midwifery skills.