Free education and training in health informatics – a reply essay sample

First of all, thank you very much for your input, Victor. I find it interesting that most of the times we communicate to others the Master program we are enrolled in, all sorts of potential career opportunities come in mind –project manager, systems analyst, bioinformatics software engineer, information security officer, etc. (American Medical Informatics Association, 2015)-, but providing training or education is not traditionally one of them. However, I find it very brave and positive that you would like to pursue this career within the health informatics area.
You have mentioned that one of the challenges as a medical informatics educator or trainer is to balance both the academic and the administrative aspects of the job. Although I fully agree with this statement, I might have to add another challenge. In my opinion, it should be absolutely necessary that you not only master the requirements of your job, but also the requirements for the future careers of your trainees, and help them become the professionals of the future.
Also, as Mantas et al. (2015) mention, other challenges are to successfully integrate students or trainees coming from different areas of knowledge (i. e. health-related sciences and computer sciences), and to design and provide educational programs adapted to their academic level, while keeping up with the everyday evolution of the field and updating the educational programs accordingly.
I would say that much is to be learned from the academic point of view, but personal experiences and wisdom of present-day educators and trainers like those reported by Hersh (2006) might also be extremely useful.

References

American Medical Informatics Association. (2015). Retrieved from http://jobs. amia. org/home/index. cfm? site_id= 15065
Hersh, W. (2006). Who are the informaticians? What we know and should know. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 13(2), 166-170.
Mantas, J., Ammenwerth, E., Demiris, G., Hasman, A., Haux, R., Hersh, W., & Wright, G. (2010). Recommendations of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) on education in biomedical and health informatics–1st revision. Methods of information in medicine, 49(2), 105-120.