YEREVAN/BOSTON — On October 7-10, more than 150 Armenian doctors participated in the first of 20 medical education workshops conducted by six Masters’ degree candidates in Health Professions Education (MHPE), a hybrid program offered by Boston University in collaboration with the HENAR Foundation. The program is designed to equip Armenian physicians, clinical educators, and healthcare professionals with contemporary competencies in leadership, teaching, research, and monitoring and evaluation skills.
The week-long Training-of-Trainer (ToT) workshops were conducted by six Masters’ degree candidates in collaboration with BU instructors. The six Masters’ students are mid-career physicians in Yerevan interested in advancing medical education in Armenia. MHPE classes started in September 2025, beginning an intensive one-year, 32-credit hybrid program offered for the first time by Boston University and its faculty. Lectures are delivered on-line three days a week by BU faculty.
Meanwhile, the Masters’ students will continue conducting ToT workshops every two weeks with 20-30 participants each from their respective institutions, transforming their departments’ residency curricula, teaching tools, and evaluation methods. BU faculty will return to Armenia in January and June 2026 to help conduct two other week-long ToT workshops—and then the program will be capped when the students travel to the USA in summer 2026 for six weeks of intensive training at clinics and health centers in the Boston area.
“We are officially launching the Training of Trainers course, which serves as a cornerstone of the Master’s Degree Program in Health Professions Education,” said Dr. Arman Voskerchyan, co-founder of the HENAR Foundation, highlighting the MHPE program as one of the key milestones in the development of healthcare education in Armenia. “Our goal has always been to be a driving force for change in the healthcare system. That is why we have designed this program as an evolutionary next step — one that unites the agendas of improving educational quality and enhancing healthcare services.”
“Many of us have been trying for years to marshal the resources of the Diaspora to make a significant, lasting contribution to the improvement of healthcare in Armenia,” said Dr. Aram Kaligian, director of the BU-Armenia Medical Partnership. He went on to thank the work of the partners who made this possible — the HENAR Foundation, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education, Yerevan State Medical University and the Armenian National Institute of Health — for their collaboration. Kaligian also thanked “the intelligent, deeply-committed Masters’ students, and all the ToT participants, for joining the workshops to help improve medical residency education and healthcare in Armenia.”
Dr. Henry Louis, HENAR project manager of the MHPE program, opened the sessions with an introduction to Instructional Design and applying it to the redesign of medical curricula. He then outlined the day’s activities — to break into groups of 20-30 to work with Masters’ students and BU faculty to develop goals and learning objectives for their respective medical specialties that can be measurable — so that residency programs are based on demonstrating clinical competency in hands-on patient care rather than on just testing theoretical knowledge of medicine.
