Digital Transformation of Face-To-Face Focus Group Methodology: Engaging a Globally Dispersed Audience to Manage Institutional Change at the World Health Organization.

Focus group discussions (FGDs) are widely used to obtain qualitative data from purposely selected groups of people. This paper describes how the Learning and Capacity Development (LCD) unit of the World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Programme (WHE) digitalized FGDs to engage with WHO staff from around the world, to listen, share, and collect their feedback in the development of a WHO learning framework. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the introduction of local lockdowns and travel restrictions resulted in the wide use of digital platforms, such as Zoom, for employee communications and collaboration capable of reaching employees wherever they are working. The LCD/WHE team drew upon the experience of WHO colleagues from human resources, country, and regional offices to set up and hold FGDs in 6 languages with participants from all WHO regions. Building on the findings of a 2019 WHO staff survey, which was part of a comprehensive, organization-wide career development initiative, the digitalized FGDs allowed for the exchange of substantive feedback, novel ideas, and alignment, connecting across different geographies, disciplines, and levels of seniority. As a result, FGDs can be successfully conducted online, but it is essential to remove barriers to participation by adopting a multilingual and flexible approach in multinational and international organizations such as the WHO.

Developing the first-ever global learning strategy to frame the future of learning for achieving public health goals.

Health is at the forefront of everyone's mind. Every country on the planet is currently experiencing the COVID19 pandemic, which is not just causing death and disease, but damaging societies and economies on a significant scale across the world.1 The current pandemic has brought into sharp focus the socio-economic factors and inequities in how people experience health and ill health and shone a spotlight on the need for lifelong learning so that health professionals, volunteers, and the public alike can adapt and respond to health threats. But even before the pandemic, the world was changing profoundly in the past few decades, and these changes impacted people's health. Unfortunately, the role of education and learning in the health domain has not kept pace with these changes. Many factors converge to create a major evolution, and some say, revolution, in how education, training and learning for health can and should be leveraged to protect and promote people's health. This paper summarizes some of the critical ideas of an 18-month process to create the first-ever global learning strategy for health by the World Health Organization.