The British Medical Association kindly funded more manikins and bag-valve-masks to go to Cameroon to help with on-going resuscitation training. Skills decay is a well known problem in health education; skills need to be practised frequently and a rolling programme of resuscitation sessions has been shown to keep people’s knowledge topped up for much longer than just doing a course every 4 years or so. The teaching equipment for the Neonatal Care Courses in Cameroon is kept centrally and Grace was very keen to have more manikins that could go to the health facilities of the trained instructors where they can keep everyone’s skills up to date, maintain their own competencies and train more peers.
Blog post by Grace in Cameroon
The aim of this baby mannequin in our health facilities is to ensure continuous education which will go a long way to prevent skill delay. In our survey assessing the knowledge, and skills following training, it was discovered that as early as 6 months after training, there was reasonable knowledge and skills lost particularly those who were not actively making use of the skills.
They will be practicing resuscitation using this mannequin so as to maintain their skills as well as teaching those who have not attended NCC so that all the babies needing resuscitation will be in safe hands.
The management and the entire staff expressed sincere gratitude to NICHE International and promised to use it effectively for the purpose and send feedback each time they have a training session.
