Good question! It stands for a Generic Instructor Course Instructor Candidate. These are people who are already experienced instructors on life support courses (the Neonatal Care Course in this case) who are now learning how to train the next batch of NCC instructors themselves. It is an important step in the sustainability of the Neonatal Care Course programme.
Many healthcare professionals in Uganda, Cameroon, Liberia, India and Zimbabwe have done the Neonatal Care Course (NCC) and learnt about the care of the newborn infant in the first 28 days of life. Selected healthcare professionals from that cohort have trained as NCC instructors and now cascade that learning to their peers informally and formally in NCCs that they run themselves with no input from the NICHE International UK-based team. However the next step whereby countries can train their own instructors has proved a hard nut to crack. We still have to send a very UK heavy team overseas to run Generic Instructor Courses and, because the team has to be 6 or 7 strong and travel is expensive, they don’t take place sufficiently regularly to train up a local team of GIC instructors. As with the NCC instructor training pathway, to become a GIC instructor, you need to be supported on two GIC courses as an instructor candidate and preferably teach on a GIC at least once a year in order to maintain full instructor status.
We are very excited therefore to have experienced Ugandan NCC instructors Elizabeth and Sadias with the team this week doing their first GIC IC training.
