Strengthening emergency medical response depends not only on well-equipped facilities, but also on ensuring that healthcare professionals have continuous access to relevant, high-quality training wherever they work. Responding to this need, the SOLIDAR Project “Together in Health Emergencies”, a project by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and implemented by GFA Consulting Group GmbH, has taken decisive steps toward establishing a national online training platform for doctors and nurses working at primary healthcare (PHC) level in Albania. 

The platform will support healthcare professionals by offering flexible, self-paced online learning focused on essential emergency care skills. The approach is particularly valuable for staff working in remote and rural Albania, where participation in face-to-face training is often constrained by distance, workload, and limited resources, a structural inequity in access to professional development that the project is deliberately designed to address. 

Recent emergencies, including the 2019 earthquake and the COVID-19 pandemic, exposed important gaps in Albania’s emergency preparedness and response, especially at PHC level. While in-person training remains indispensable, it cannot reach all frontline professionals in a timely or cost-effective way. An online learning platform therefore offers a practical and complementary solution, allowing healthcare workers to access accredited training without leaving their workplaces and without disrupting service delivery to patients. 

SOLIDAR has initiated preparatory work for a Learning Management System (LMS) that will serve as a long-term tool for continuous professional development in emergency medical care. As defined in the project’s technical framework, the platform is designed to be user-friendly, secure, scalable, and compatible with multiple devices. It will host accredited training modules, monitor learner progress, and issue certificates aligned with professional relicensing requirements set by Albania’s health authorities. The platform will be hosted by the National Medical Emergency Center (QKUM), ensuring national ownership and long-term sustainability beyond the project lifetime. 

By October 2025, SOLIDAR had completed the conceptual and preparatory phase. This included defining technical requirements, clarifying institutional roles, and outlining an implementation roadmap covering platform development, pilot testing, administrator training, monitoring, and long-term maintenance. The next phase will see the platform built through a coordinated effort involving a specialized IT service provider and a medical subject-matter expert responsible for the emergency care content. Once operational, it will offer modular, learner-centred training grounded in real-life emergency scenarios that doctors and nurses encounter every day at PHC level. 

By investing in digital learning infrastructure, SOLIDAR is helping to reduce disparities in access to training between urban and rural areas, while strengthening a culture of continuous learning within Albania’s national health system. As implementation progresses, this initiative is expected to become an important pillar of Albania’s emergency medical training ecosystem by supporting healthcare professionals to remain prepared, confident, and ready to respond effectively when emergencies arise.