….is a Cameroonian expression meaning do your best to improve things wherever you find yourself. 

During the last 2 days our newly trained Instructor Candidates have stepped up and exceeded expectations in the way they have trained 16 learners on a Neonatal Care Course.  Some of these new trainers come from rural districts in the Northern Abamawa Region, where they work in small isolated units.  They are determined to improve the standard of newborn care in the places they work.  They will indeed be brightening their corner!

It is always a great moment as an instructor trainer to watch someone you have just trained stand up and deliver a lecture, facilitate a workshop or teach a skill in the way that the Resus Council’s Generic Instructor Course (GIC) suggests. In the UK, we don’t often have the privilege of seeing this beautiful transition from student to teacher as people disperse after a GIC and teach on their provider courses at a different time. Because of the financial and environmental cost of NICHE volunteers travelling long distances to the countries where we are active, we now attach 2 NCCs to the end of every GIC to complete the new instructors’ training. And the rewards for the exhausted team of trainers are immense.

These 16 healthcare professionals are learning about the care of the newborn infant in the first 28 days of life. (There should have been 4 more but it was too dangerous for them to travel down from Bamenda in the North West region of Cameroon which still has a significant amount of civil unrest). The learners are also providing the new instructors with the means to complete their training as instructors as each newly trained instructor has to teach on 2 NCCs, supervised by more senior instructors, in order to be fully fledged instructors themselves.

The NICHE team of 4 has been working very hard this week to deliver a GIC and these 2 NCCs. They started the week by running a one day instructor update for the established NCC faculty in Cameroon who have been courageously continuing the project throughout their country’s period of civil unrest and the pandemic.

You can read more about our first Instructor Development Day below.

We are delighted to be welcoming Dr Ferenc Sari to the team for this week’s trip to Cameroon. An emergency department doctor and an educator with the European Resuscitation Council, he has lots of experience of living, working and teaching overseas. We were on tenterhooks for his Covid PCR result as he has only recently recovered from the illness but all 4 instructors had negative results yesterday and are now en route to Yaoundé from Sweden, Northern Ireland and the UK.

The team has a heavy week ahead of them. They are facilitating the first ever Instructors Development Day (IDD) as well as a Generic Instructor Course (GIC) followed by two Neonatal Care Courses (NCC).

NICHE Instructors are excited to be returning to Cameroon later this month. We are piloting a specially written Instructors’ Development Day for the faculty members there to support their Continuing Professional Development. This will be followed by a Generic Instructor Course with two of the Cameroonian faculty beginning to train as instructor trainers themselves (see step 9 of the “10-steps to sustainability” plan) and two more Neonatal Care Courses (NCCs).

Over 300 healthcare professionals in Cameroon have been trained in the care of the newborn infant in the first 28 days of life and the team is beginning to see the positive effect on their neonatal mortality figures.