We currently run courses in Cameroon, Uganda and Liberia: the Neonatal Care Course (NCC) teaches health professionals best practice in the care of the newborn infant in the first 28 days of life, and the Generic Instructor Course (GIC) trains selected candidates in how to teach the Neonatal Care Course. The whole approach is based on a 10 steps to sustainable learning programme which we have devised.
Above, volunteer resuscitation officer, Colin, shows trainee instructors how to maintain the manikins.
cameroon
In Cameroon, we work in partnership with the Cameroon Baptist Convention Health Services (CBCHS) which has six hospitals across Cameroon.
Until 2016, the Newborn Care Course was delivered in Cameroon under the auspices of Maternal and Childhealth Advocacy International.
NICHE International was set up by some of the instructors involved in those courses in order to continue the project that was started in 2014.
Learners to date have come from government hospitals, St Mary’s RC Hospital and the CBCHS hospitals and clinics. CBCHS funds their staff members’ transport, food, accommodation and the course manuals.
The Cameroon Ministry of Public Health is supportive of the Newborn Care Course but can not, at the moment, fund its own health staff to attend. For the last two years, NICHE International and CBCHS have sponsored some learners from the government hospitals.
In the meantime, the project in Cameroon has reached sustainability (see our 10 steps to sustainability) with the first course taught without outside involvement in Bamenda, in January 2020. Our Cameroonian colleagues have continued to run Neonatal Care Courses with out us throughout the pandemic and throughout their country’s period of civil unrest.
We are currently fundraising to take the project from Step 8 to Step 10 of the 10-step to sustainability plan.
There is a strong local faculty of instructors in Cameroon but they need help learning how to train the next cohort of instructors themselves.
We are also working with Grace on a plan for on-going instructor development and remote support from NICHE International.
Contact us for further details on this project.
liberia
In 2018 we were invited by MCAI to deliver the first Neonatal Care Course in Liberia.
This was to support some amazing work they are doing training neonatal nurses and midwives in extended skills and setting up neonatal care units in hospitals across the country.
Each of these units is managed by a neonatal technician (nurse with extended training and role) as doctors are few and far between in Liberia and many do not have much in the way of neonatal training.
NICHE International instructors returned to Liberia in 2019 to run the first Generic Instructor Course (read more about it on the blog) as well as four more Neonatal Care Courses on which the new local instructors were supervised so that they completed their instructor training.
Liberia is now at Step 8 of the 10-steps to sustainability plan.
A complete teaching set was left with Kola and his team for them to run their own courses without UK instructor input.
Contact us for further details on this project.
Uganda
4 international instructors were delighted to travel to Uganda in February 2022 after a 2 year enforced grounding because of the coronavirus pandemic. We facilitated two Neonatal Care Courses with 15 learners on each and will be returning to Bwindi Community Hospital in November 2022 to deliver the first Generic Instructor Courses there.
Uganda is at Step 1 of the 10 steps to sustainability plan.