What is AHUZEM (Family Medicine Distance Education Center)?
In our country, Family Medicine transition period trainings are divided into two main stages. The first one is the 1st Stage Adaptation Trainings and the second one is the 2nd Stage Clinical Trainings.
While the first stage trainings include the basic concepts and philosophy of Family Medicine discipline, the second stage trainings aim to ensure that the physicians coming from different fields have similar clinical knowledge.
AHUZEM trainings refer to the mentioned second stage trainings.
AHUZEM Effectiveness Evaluation Report
The main objective of the transition to the family medicine system is to provide individuals with access to healthy life programs, to reduce maternal and infant mortality, to prioritize combating infectious diseases and risk factors of chronic diseases, to improve individuals' ability to control their own health status and to fully place preventive medicine approach at the center of health.
The World Health Organization lists among its goals the better accessibility of people to family and community-based primary health care services by 2010 and the understanding of "Health for All" in the 21st century as a continuation of the decision taken at the Alma Ata congress. The Family Medicine System, which aims to realize these goals, envisages to provide family-based primary health care services in an integrated manner with health teams equipped with the necessary training and skills.
With the implementation of family medicine, primary health care services, which were carried out on a regional basis in the health center system, started to be carried out on a population basis. The average population registered per family physician is 3,500.
Turkey has significant shortages in the number of health human resources, particularly physicians and nurses. Despite these shortages, family physicians across the country continue to work selflessly. Only 4.6 percent of the physicians currently working as family physicians are family medicine specialists. The majority of family physicians are general practitioners.
During the transition to the family medicine system, physicians who will become family physicians were certified as family physicians through a training called "Family Medicine Phase I Training". In these face-to-face regional trainings, our physicians have updated their practical knowledge about family medicine theoretically.
In order to ensure the Continuing Professional Development of our family physicians, within the scope of the protocol signed between the Public Health Institution of Turkey and Yıldırım Beyazıt University on October 23, 2012, a distance education system has been provided on 167 topics under 16 Training Modules through Yıldırım Beyazıt University Distance Education System AHUZEM since December 3, 2012. In the preparation of these trainings, 85 academicians from 26 universities took part. A total of 22,241 Family Physicians (95.6% of our family physicians participated in the trainings provided through AHUZEM.) With the question pools created for these trainings, pre-tests were applied before the trainings and post-tests were applied after the trainings were completed.
The success rates of our family physicians participating in the training program, which were 69 percent in pre-tests, increased to 85 percent in post-tests. With this report, the pre-test and post-test results of the trainings under the training modules were analyzed and the success of the trainings was measured. The scores of the physicians who participated in the trainings and the success of the trainings on a national and provincial basis were reported.
Family Medicine Distance Education Center (AHUZEM - 2014), with its new name Family Physicians In-Service Trainings, can be found here.
