This is not the first time I've blogged about Malaria Matters! This is an elearning course which will take you through the Guidelines for malaria prevention in travellers from the UK, published by the UKHSA. This course has been available for many years in a number of formats (and I've updated it every time the Malaria Guidelines were updated), but I've just spent the last three months completely over hauling it. Here's a little history!
In 2008 I was invited by GSK to write the material for this course and work alongside a medical education company to produce an interactive modular course based on the guidelines. The opportunity was both exciting and daunting at times, but resulted in a CD Rom which was initially launched in 2009 and given out to customers, purely as an educational tool and was used for a good two years. Unfortunately, updating it with new guidelines was a large task and it was decided no longer possible to produce by the company. However, they very generously allowed me to take over its ownership from that point. |
| Who remembers this image of the CD Rom back in 2009 - 2011? |
In 2014 I started to develop the course material working with an e learning designer to put the course onto an e learning platform. It was at this time I won the Triennial Scholarship (of £2000) from the Faculty of Travel Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow and the award helped towards the overall production costs of £5000.
Since that time I have developed my own e learning skills such that I've been able to update the work each year in line with the latest guidelines document. I undertake this work gladly in my own time and receive no income for such. However, to host it on a platform which produces a certificate comes at quite a significant cost and I was keen to continue providing the learning free of charge. Therefore in 2018 I moved the course onto a new platform, but did not provide a certificate. I have no idea how many people took the course, whether they completed it and if it was of value.
Fast forward to 2025 and I've found my e learning skills have developed significantly - I absolutely love making it. I also now have a digitial learning store platform, which comes at a cost, but its a far better way to manage elearning and also provides a certificate!
So I have taken the decision to now charge for the course which has taken me much of the last three months to update and given it a complete refresh as well. BUT I don't want to make money out of the education. This is why I am donating the profit of the course to a charity which is a new initiative, currently being developed by the African Diaspora Initiative, called 'Africans Against Malaria'. This is a really exciting new project which I'll be writing about again in the future when its further developed.
So if you take Malaria Matters in the future, not only will it provide you with good and helpful education at a very low cost, it will provide you with a certificate of completion, and your fee will provide £25 for every course taken towards this charity.
A little bit of background - a walk down memory lane!
The videos of me and the consultation were taken back in 2008 and yes I've aged! That was a long day in my surgery in Bedford, with the camera crew filming the whole day, but such an experience. I think we finished around 5.30pm and after, I raced down to the O2 in London, as my good friend Maggie had invited me to join her to see Stevie Wonder! Just a couple of months after this whole experience, I discovered I had a serious breast cancer which meant I was off work for about 18 months, but I remember thinking how proud I was of the end product for this course and it's benefits - through what was quite a dark period of time, so it holds a very special place in my life.
Malaria prevention was the subject of my Masters dissertation back in 1998 where I looked at the standard of care provided in all the GP surgeries in the county of Bedfordshire. After I finished my studies and with two young sons, I never got around to getting the important results published. So in 2006 I repeated the entire project which again took a long time to execute and analyse. I really wanted to get it published and the paper was accepted, but it coincided with a time I was going through treatment and although I wanted to learn how do some statistics on the data, it just wasn't feasible. So the published research is as it is, and you can see it here, but it nevertheless highlighted what we refer to as an 'inverse care law'. In other words, those who needed the care the most, received the worst care.
Since this time I have tried hard to educate on malaria prevention and provided many tools on the subject to help practitioner to give good care, and I hope over the years, it's helped both practitioners and travellers alike.
