Ghana
Other Years
Lesley Fudge, FoAN co-founder and Trustee and Lesley Wood, Lead Surgical Care Practitioner from Cambridge University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, a Molnlycke award winner, delivered the year one FoAN educational programme in Accra, Ghana in April 2008.
A total of 77 theatre nurses from 30 hospitals outside Accra and 9 hospitals in the Accra region attended the five-day programme at the General Registered Nurses Association, Accra, although preparations had only been made and funded for 50. This additional pressure was absorbed by FoAN but it was made clear that this is not sustainable for future programmes as FoAN has only limited charitable resources and needs to set and meet budgets for all annual programmes. Overspend on one programme will mean that there is less available for other countries.
The programme was kindly opened by the Minister of Health and the General Secretary of General Registered Nurses Association who were warmly thanked for their time. The ceremony was filmed by and shown on national news and reported in two national papers, so had a very high profile. We had a very busy week with so many delegates and made great efforts to ensure that each of them had some individual time allocated to their needs. What we learnt is that Ghanaians are a competitive and assertive nation! There was a lot of noise and fun over the week, with delegates putting themselves forward to present workshop feedback.
The younger nurses in the group were aware of best practice although frustrated that they could not put theory into practice in their workplace because of lack of resource. All the tutors from the critical care and perioperative school of nursing attended the course along with a nursing author of the first perioperative theory book written for Ghanaians by a Ghanaian. Rebecca, kindly gave both the Lesleys a signed personal copy each.
Our perceptions from the programme and clinical visits were that Ghana is further ahead that other countries visited both academically and in the limited resources available but still hungry for recent educational information and still resource poor. Communication since the visit has been frequent and from many of the delegates and in-country teachers who want to know when we will be coming back for the second visit. We were delighted to hear that a perioperative interest group is to be formed under the auspices of the GRNA and are delighted to have been invited to support this progress.
On Saturday, before we left for home, the tutors had invited us out for the day for some sightseeing and a picnic. Sylvia, our dynamic 'mother earth' tutor, had cooked a huge picnic of fish and fufu and other local delicacies for lunch, but not before we had all done a very scary canopy rope walk in the tropical rain forest near the coast. This was eventful as the ladders slipped abandoning some walkers high up on a platform in the canopy, but soon resolved by the local rangers. It did make the rest of the rope walk a bit adrenaline driven and the shaky knees didn't help much either!
We look forward to the second programme and many of the delegates invited us to come to their hospitals on our return.