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It is vital for doctors and nurses in developing countries to keep up-to-date with new treatment recommendations and new developments in their field. But many of them can’t do so because they can’t access the internet easily – owing to problems with their electricity supply, or not having a connection for long enough to download the information they need. TALC (Teaching-aids At Low Cost) is dealing with this problem. We collect valuable, up-to-date health information from journals, books and newsletters and put it all on CD-ROMs. We then mail our e-TALC CDs free to the health workers in developing countries who are on our database. We have sent out 10 free issues of the e-TALC CDs to health workers in the past 5 years – about 5,000 per mailing. £ 100,000 would allow us to Issue # 11. Keeping doctors updated undoubtedly saves many lives across the world.
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“ This CD-ROM has become the main source for increasing our knowledge and we have very few sources for updating our knowledge.” – Doctor, Tanzania “ These (e-TALC CDs) are very simple, with innovative and up-to-date resources. Our health team in this district has found these an irreplaceable source of information.” – Doctor, South Africa TALC has been supplying doctors and nurses in developing countries with health education materials for over 40 years. We realised that health workers could not easily access the internet to keep themselves up-to-date. Many only have an irregular electricity supply or computers powered from the hospital generator. Good broadband access is very rare. So we set up e-TALC. We collect useful health material from sources like the British Medical Journal, the Lancet, Africa Health; from international agencies like WHO and UNICEF; from NGO newsletters, from publishers and from contributors working in developing countries. We put all this information onto CDs, with software to allow easy retrieval of information. We then send them free to all the health workers on our e-TALC database – about 3,500 – who have requested them. So far, we have sent out 10 Issues, 1 or 2 issues per year, approximately 45,000 CD-ROMs. Each issue costs us about £ 10,000 to produce: - compiling and inputting the material, copying the CDs, postage to health workers in 170 countries across the world. Countries in Africa with the largest number of recipient users for e-TALC Issue 8 were: Nigeria ( 811); Uganda (508); Ghana (478); Tanzania (227); South Africa (210) and Ethiopia (166). Among the sample on our database of users from Ethiopia were: - 17 Doctors, 3 Health Coordinators, 4 Nurses, 3 Specialists – in Anaesthesia, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Ophthalmology and Eye Health and 4 students of Pharmacy, Laboratory Technology and Public Health. £ 100,000 would enable us to produce and send out a further 10 Issues to health workers. It would also support other work to move e-TALC towards becoming self-financing. Find out more: www.talcuk.org/e-talc.htm