Kola’s turns of phrase when he’s lecturing have been delighting Jo and I all day. The title of this and the previous posts are good examples of the fervour with which he plays his role as MCAI’s on the ground neonatal trainer. And he is not alone. Gertrude, Agnes and Christina are equally dedicated to their patients and their unit, totally committed to the patients they look after. And totally engaged in their roles today as instructor candidates on the Newborn Care Course.
There is nothing, nothing so heartening as watching someone you’ve just trained as an instructor teaching better than you.
This is Kola putting his all into his lectures, carrying his learners with him on a wave of enthusiasm. A truly inspirational educator.
He was good last year but, not only is he even better this year now that’s he been trained but he also keeps to time! Just about….
These neonatal clinicians and 1 doctor now have to teach on two Newborn Care Courses supervised in order to complete their training as instructors. The NICHE International volunteer instructors should be able to complete this whole process in the one 10-day trip. We will also be leaving a teaching set (4 manikins, scenario teaching sets and a projector) with the new Liberian faculty so that they can start to organise and run their own courses. It would be nice to be invited back to help out though!
Julia recently spoke at a national conference on “The challenge of sustainability” in newborn care training. NICHE International’s vision of the Holy Grail of sustainability is in the slide below:
There is much written on skills decay over time and the lack of sustainability in the model of flying outside instructors to a country for a week to teach resuscitation skills and expect attitudes and habits to change as a result. That is why we concentrate on training local instructors and have developed our 10-step path to sustainability (see under sustainability section of the website). That is also why we are so excited about the course currently running in Yaounde, Cameroon.
These workshops and lectures are being delivered by people we trained as instructors last year:
This is Alison and Jarlath, busy in Cameroon mentoring 12 local instructors through their instructor candidate newborn care courses. We use the UK model for training instructors. They first have to do a two day very intense instructor training course known as the generic instructor course (GIC). Then they have to teach on 2 newborn care courses but are supervised during that time by a more senior instructor. At the end of this they are fully fledged newborn care course instructors. It is quite demanding training, the same as the UK advanced life support instructors go through, but is one of the best short instructor training courses available. The NICHE instructors are on site this week to complete the training of the 12 local instructors who did their generic instructor course this time last year. As a team, we are very heartened by this step. It is step 8 in our sustainability plan and means that we can remove ourselves from Cameroon for a few years. Step 9 and 10 will take place when the trained local instructors have done enough courses to start training as instructor trainers themselves. We hope to be invited back for that stage in two or three years time.
