After three-months of hard works and dedications, twenty public health work workers from 14 provinces and city in Cambodia has finally completed the FETP frontline course cohort 5. Over three months period from November 2023 to February 2024, trainees were completed numerous surveillance field projects and responses. Over 80 field work products on surveillance and responses were produced and shared among their networks and peers in the second and third FETP frontline workshop.
During the closing ceremony on 21 February 2024, His Excellency Dr. Hoy Serey Vathanak, Deputy Director General of Health of the Cambodia Ministry of Health, acknowledged the importance of field epidemiology training program in building capacity of public health workers across the country to prepare for the public health emergency as the public health threads growing in the region as examples of recent Covid19 pandemic, influenza outbreaks of AH5N1, AH1N1 pdm, MERS, SARS ,etc. had proved. His excellency deputy director general encouraged the twenty fresh graduates to apply their skills learnt in the FETP frontline course to monitor the disease trends and take necessary actions to control any outbreaks in their community. His excellency deputy director also thanked to US Center for Disease Control and Prevention and its partner, SAFETYNET for the tremendous support to Cambodia FETP and Ministry of Health.
Dato Dr. Fadzilah Kamaludin, Deputy Director of SAFETYNET, who joined the closing ceremony virtually, congratulated the 20 fresh graduates and the Cambodia FETP as well as the mentors and supervisors on that remarkable day. She has noted that there are many good recommendations from trainees’ projects and she hope the policy and decision makers will follow up and follow through these recommendations and not just remain as trainee project recommendations for their assignment requirement. She also took the opportunity to inform about the second Safetynet Conference that will be in Sabah, Malaysia in November 2025. She hopes the trainees with the help from mentors and supervisors will review their work and polish them and get the abstracted accepted and present them at the conference. Dato Dr. Fadzilah ended her remarks by expressing the thankfulness to the ministry of health and SAFEYNET’s partner, US CDC, for the great collaboration in Cambodia. She stressed that SAFETYNET will continue to give our upmost effort to deliver in the country.