….is a Cameroonian expression meaning do your best to improve things wherever you find yourself.
Instructor candidate Dr Matzo Fanny Kigne teaches practical skills on a Neonatal Care Course.
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!
Newly trained NCC instructors teaching their first course
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.
Keen midwives and nurses being trained in newborn care on the NCC currently going on in Yaoundé
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.
3rd Cameroonian GIC completed and the first 2 local GIC instructors have begun their training
This is what our programme manager for newborn training in Cameroon said today, as we were coming to the end of their successful “train the trainers” course.
Dr Ferenc Sari, European Resuscitation Council educator, and our educator on this week’s GIC course in Cameroon, has been impressed by the progress of the participants over the 2 days. We are privileged to be able to witness and support their first teaching experience which will occur when they teach on Neonatal Care Courses later in the week.
A GIC candidate taking Alison through a resuscitation scenarioGIC candidates discussing peer-to-peer learning
The learning conversation is a term used in adult education, and is a skill required for giving feedback to learners on their performance. A well-managed learning conversation should leave learners feeling “relieved, valued and clear about their next steps”. It is not an easy skill to master, and requires practice.
In Cameroon this week, NICHE instructors have spent a day refreshing the skills of newly qualified local Neonatal Care Course instructors. The learning conversation was one of the skills we spent time on together. During these sessions we sat in a circle with the candidates, sometimes know as “circle of trust”. This was a new concept to them, but they embraced the principles. The exercise emphasised the importance of trust, particularly as we all come from such different cultures and backgrounds.
This is the group of 11 Instructors who attended the first Instructor Development Day that NICHE has run. They came from 5 different Regions in Cameroon, and did their instructor training in 2016 and 2018. They are a mixture of doctors, nurses and midwives. All were keen to refresh and develop their skills as trainers and the course was lively and enjoyed by everyone.
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.
Ferenc’s journey is probably the longest
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.
Departure Covid PCRs “kindly” done by Bwindi lab technician
We are back in Entebbe now after 2 very successful Neonatal Care Courses, full of enthusiasm about returning in November to train the instructors we have identified.
Kihihi airport building, jeeps waiting to pick up tourists for gorilla safarisLeaving with quite heavy hearts. We have been so well looked after and have been so impressed with the work being done at Bwindi.
12 seater plane Entebbe to Kihihi airstrip in south western UgandaJulia, Grace and Kirstie looking fairly relaxed en route to Kihihi
This was the 12 seater plane that brought us to Kihihi yesterday, the nearest airstrip to Bwindi Community Hospital. We were the only ones on it with our 2 pilots, and we are very grateful that we were allowed to bring the extra teaching equipment with us. The photos are reminiscent of Liberia in 2019.
Storm Eunice over the UK threatened our departure plans and Grace had fun and games with her visa from Cameroon but we all arrived safely and in good spirits.
It is just great to be out doing this again after 2 years grounded in our individual home countries. Flying over the the world’s largest and driest sand desert—the ‘Rub’al-Khali’— in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman I felt like my world had opened up again. We are so very privileged to be able to volunteer like this, to be accepted into other people’s lives, to teach and to learn.
We are delighted and very excited that we are at last going abroad again – tomorrow!
I (and the family cat) have been packing up 4 teaching sets and trying to keep the weight down as our internal flights from Entebbe to Kihihi allow rather less baggage than we normally take with us.
Julia (and Chocco) packing up teaching equipment for NICHE’s first trip to Uganda
We are going to Bwindi Community Hospital to teach the first two Neonatal Care Courses and to recruit some keen would-be instructors.
We have a multinational team instructing this time around – Jarlath joining us from Ireland, Kirstie and Julia from the UK and Grace from Cameroon.
We are grateful to the charity Child Health Matters and to the Souter Trust for funding a large part of this trip.
