LAUSR

313 Roger M.K. Ng WPA Secretary for Education people with mental health problems will be deprived of optimal care. In the current triennium, one of the items of the WPA Action Plan is to enhance the mental health capacities around the world. Education and training in evidence­based clinical knowledge and skills are essential to achieve this goal. With Internet and smart­ phone technologies gaining popularity worldwide, the WPA Secretary for Educa­ tion’s work plans have also focused more on Internet­based education. The WPA has been recently able to pur­ chase a licence for a learning management platform (known as the “LMS”), reorgan­ ize and update some of its many existing educational materials, recruit a part­time educational coordinator, and develop sev­ eral new online educational modules for the LMS with the kind support from ex­ perts 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 middle­income countries) with new opportunities to learn and to update their psychiatric knowledge and skills. In par­ ticular, we have been able to develop mod­ ules on several vital topics – some examples being telepsychiatry, intimate partner vio­ lence, and basic psychotherapy. Such en­ hancement 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 por­ tal and close to 4,000 viewed the education­ al portal webpage. The profile of registered users is vast, with close to 50 countries rep­ resented 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 Soci­ eties and our mental health partners. We are eager to maintain the momentum cre­ ated during this launch phase and to build on it to ensure a valuable and sustainable resource well into the future. In the com­ ing year, the WPA would also like to further develop and expand the number of educa­ tional materials available, commission new materials on evolving areas and issues, ex­ pand the search functionality and language capability of the system, refine the registra­ tion process, and diversify the information gathered. Apart from didactic learning through the modules available in the WPA educa­ tional portal, experiential learning is obvi­ ously 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 programme. Due to travel restrictions related to COVID­19, online volunteering will be the main focus in the year 2021. Through face­to­face 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 po­ tential 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 recom­ mendations on the attributes of expert vol­ unteers, 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 field­testing and fine­tuning the practical logistics, and evaluating the effec­ tiveness and satisfaction with the project. These exciting developments will soon be available on the website of the WPA.