MedLern, a digital training platform for hospitals and healthcare professionals, has now added multilingual capabilities in 8 Indian regional languages. The move is aimed at addressing the language barriers often faced by interested healthcare professionals who lack adequate English language skills and understanding in order to enhance the impact of the courses provided on its platform.
The move to introduce the application interface and courses in regional languages comes as a direct response to the increasing demand by healthcare workers and hospitals in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, as well as surveys which showed that health practitioners from smaller cities have a hard time understanding teachings in English, unlike their counterpart doctors and graduate nurses from Tier 1 bigger cities who have a good grasp of the English language.
The project is set to begin with 8 major languages in the pilot phase, all drawn from the four zones of the country. The 8 languages include Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, and Bengali. MedLern is already providing the platform and courses to healthcare professionals in these regions and has seen adoption in hospitals of all sizes. Making basic hospital training, processes and procedures accessible will benefit both hospitals and employees – opening up opportunities and improving the quality of care.
The courses are targeted primarily at general duty staff such as medical and nursing assistants who lack proper English skills. The point is to ensure that these staff are well educated on the procedures and can absorb the necessary knowledge and skills to thrive in their profession.
MedLern currently has 150 nursing medical colleges and 400 hospitals in its network whose staff from the nursing cadre and below can benefit from the new courses. Mr Deepak Sharma, Co-Founder & CEO, MedLern said, "It is focused at staff within the level of nursing assistants, general duty assistants, allied health professionals, technicians and below, so the depth is basic and operational, and is not as technical as other advanced courses. In order to make it work, we've worked with both internal and external experts to produce and compile all the contents in the different languages. These experts are also involved in the review process to ensure quality is maintained at all times.
This way, users and learners can better understand and benefit from the courses. There are some other areas with emerging demand which we'll focus on in the future, including courses for healthcare at home, mental health, and other specialised areas. One good thing about these new courses is the fact that they are cost-effective because we realise that practitioners from Tier 2 and 3 regions that need these courses have limited financial capacity."
MedLern was founded in 2020, and has in the last three years, built a world-class full-stack medical training platform that caters to the knowledge needs of healthcare professionals in India and across the globe.