Maternal and child health supercourse for the former Soviet Union countries

Maternal and child health (MCH) is a growing concern among the countries of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) where economic issues and changing infrastructures are seriously deteriorating the public health system. Moreover, in the past decade, lack of primary prevention programs coupled with a shortage of well-trained public health professionals are having an increasingly negative impact on MCH outcomes. In this article, we provide a brief overview of the current state of MCH, health care and public health education in the FSU. We suggest that indices could be improved by developing new inexpensive information exchange systems, and that system is Supercourse (accessible at www.pitt.edu/ approximately super1). Supercourse is an Internet-based library of public health lectures in PowerPoint format that are accessible, free of charge to anyone, anywhere, who has Internet access including scientists, doctors, and, specifically, educators. As of April 2007, Supercourse has more than 3,200 public health lectures, a network of more than 42,000 faculty members across 151 countries, with Nobel Prize winners and the former head of the CDC being among the lectures' authors. Supercourse lectures are aimed at the educator with the goal of improving public health training through timely and customizable lectures. The distinguishing features of Supercourse are ease of access in low-bandwidth lecture, minimal cost, a distribution system for lectures in CD format, high-quality content, and the capacity to create and sustain a global network of public health professionals. Additionally, statistical process control procedures for industry developed by W. Edwards Deming are utilized to ensure the quality of Supercourse lectures. Papers on Supercourse already have been published in the British Medical Journal, Nature, and Lancet, and are having a wide impact in the field of public health. Currently, an increasing number of lectures in the Supercourse library are dedicated to the theme of MCH. Low cost, high impact projects such as Supercourse are needed to improve and deploy MCH education worldwide.