Partners

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On March 7, 2022,  GPN signed an agreement with RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia to collaborate on the provision of distance education programmes to underserved communities globally. RMIT has a long history of working with underserved communities, including aboriginal communities in Australia and communities in the Philippines. More recently, they have entered southeast Asia, and are collaborating with local partners in Indonesia. We also look forward to working with them as they expand into Cambodia and Timor Leste (East Timor), by a number of measures the poorest country in the East Asian/Pacific Region. 

Under the new agreement, we will create a shared learning portal on RMIT’s learning management system, so that our learners will log into a university-branded interface. We will have access to RMIT’s suite of audiovisual learning aids for the generation of new learning materials, and we will share learning materials that we will create together. We have already begun loading GPN educational presentations onto the new LMS, and anticipate migrating all of our learners to the new portal when we recruit our next cohort. All of this will reduce operating expenses for our learning programmes and make better use of our educational materials. There is also the opportunity to collaborate on other projects related to health and international development. Among these is an innovative technology for the fitting of prostheses, a significant problem in many countries where amputation is the first line of intervention for extensive limb injuries and prostheses are beyond the financial means of many.

Thanks to Dein Vindigni and Dawn Wong Lit Wan of RMIT University for developing this agreement and our strategy of collaboration.

In February 2021, we signed a memorandum of understanding with CoRSU Hospital in Uganda to work together to improve rehabilitation services for disabled children in that country. Established as a private, non-profit institution in 2006, CoRSU aims to be a centre of excellence in Uganda, providing orthopaedic and plastic surgery, and comprehensive rehabilitation services for people with disabilities, prioritizing children. Our 3-year agreement with CoRSU Hospital will see us focusing on continuing education for their staff, capitalizing on our growing Learning Management System and our successful telementoring program as part of the global Project ECHO (echo.unm.edu).