Abstract
Educating employees on health risks and related behavior has always been a company’s challenge. Convincing them to adopt the company’s health strategies is long, difficult and culturally sensitive. As some health risks are emerging or re-emerging, such as pandemics, vector borne diseases or HIV, fortunately employee self-education has never been as much a trend as shown by the frantic use of wikis, blogs or Google®. Some companies have understood that new web-based technology allow them to develop tools to raise employees awareness of risk exposure and management.
In the context of a pandemic, a company's ability to limit infections within the workplace would depend on the cooperation of all staff and their adherence to plans. Similarly, employees working in malaria endemic areas would need to understand the rationale for chemoprophylaxis and mosquito bite prevention. This basically all relies upon the understanding of the risk and the personal feeling of responsibility.
We present how Employee Education and Awareness Packages allow companies to meet their duty of care by ensuring that every targeted / exposed group has benefited from the same health education commitments quickly and effectively.
Online Learning Courses are accessible via the web or the company HSE intranet. Some are used as a stand-alone campaign or integrated into a regular schedule of staff training. They usually consist of several lessons, downloadable summaries, and test questions. An online manager can achieve traceability of training through the administration of courses.
The purpose of this paper is to review the effectiveness and the benefits of this promising type of interventions in the field of pandemic preparedness and malaria education. The objective is to see how it can fit into a holistic learning environment among other traditional employee education strategies.
