Amazon Web Services and the Yale School of Public Health are partnering with nonprofit consortium Volunteer Surge to recruit and train 1 million volunteer healthcare workers online before sending them into the field to help with COVID-19 care.
AWS will power the virtual learning platform, which volunteers will use to complete a 30-hour online community health worker course developed by the New Haven, Conn.-based Yale School of Public Health. The initiative aims to offer communities across the country volunteer support to free up physicians' and nurses' time to focus on the most critical COVID-19 care operations.
"Task-shifting, which allows tasks to be delegated from doctors and nurses to trained health workers, can reduce the burden on our system and save lives by allowing scarce medical workers to focus on the more serious COVID 19 care operations while trained healthcare volunteers pick up other tasks," Yale School of Public Health Dean Sten Vermund, MD, PhD, said in a news release.
Once they have completed the virtual course, volunteers will take on responsibilities including staffing drive-thru COVID-19 testing sites, offering health support to home-bound seniors via telephone and taking vital signs in tent triage centers.