The Global Health Delivery Project, a collaboration between BWH and Harvard University, has recently created an online community for health care professionals around the world to discuss Ebola treatment and containment. Started in late September, the “Ebola Response community” now has over 278 members from 65 different countries from over 240 organizations. There are several members from the most Ebola-afflicted countries, including Sierra Leone and Liberia, as well as countries that have successfully contained the disease, such as Nigeria and Senegal.
The online forum provides a space for members to share resources to aid colleagues on the front lines in their efforts to respond to this recent epidemic. It also serves as a means to share and discuss information, policy, and other topics pertinent to Ebola containment. Some general discussion topics include personal protective equipment guidelines, organizational preparedness checklists, standards for volunteers being deployed, and managing health care workers after Ebola exposure.
The forum’s host, GHDonline, is a product of the Global Health Delivery Project, and a larger online platform of professional communities for health care providers worldwide to collaborate. Since 2008, over 13,000 global health professionals from 182 countries have become active members of GHDonline.