Kenya
Other Years
Kenya 2003
The first visit was made to Kenya in November 2003. Lesley and Kate were kindly hosted by the Aga Khan Hospital in Nairobi for week of teaching. The Ministry of Health had enabled the students to travel from all corners of Kenya to attend the course, and paid for their accommodation. 49 nurses from 34 different city and rural hospitals attended the course. Delegates from Tanzania and Rwanda also joined the group.
The course followed the same programme as had been successfully delivered in Zambia and Uganda , updated in the light of experience!
Key topics included:-
- The environment - ventilation, radiation protection, manual handling, care of instruments, universal precautions and hospital acquired infection.
- Personal issues - scrubbing, masks, gowning, antistatic precautions and surgical smoke.
- Sterile supplies and inventory management - latex allergy, aseptic technique, safe handling of instruments, swabs and instrument counts. Endoscopy.
- The patient - preoperative care, including documentation, vulnerable groups, skin prep, shaving, anaesthetics - sedation, local and regional and general. Intraoperative care - electrosurgery, pressure care, positioning. sterilisers/chemicals, tourniquets. Care of specimens. Postoperative care. Airway management. Drug checking. Pain control. Observations and documentation. Handover.
- The staff - Department structure. Teamwork and skill mix, education and training, accountability and scope of practice and change management.
Workshops are very popular, using scenarios, with Kate and Lesley facilitating the groups and each group then electing a spokesperson to feedback. This teaching method is generally unfamiliar to the delegates, and they find the alternative type of learning to be very instructive.
Each session is deliberatively made to be highly participative with prior levels of knowledge checked at the beginning of the session and understanding identified at the end.
Evaluation forms are detailed and enable the teachers to identify changes necessary to the programme, on an ongoing basis.
The week's programme evaluated very well, with 56% saying that the course had added significantly to their knowledge and 43% identifying that it had added to their knowledge.
All participants were encouraged to return to their hospitals and be 'agents of change'.
A visit was made by Kate and Lesley to the Ministry of Health to meet the Chief Nursing Officer formally, and to provide some information about the course content and some issues arising from information gleaned.
Acknowledgements and grateful thanks to the Johnson and Johnson team especially Steve Mburu who assisted us in Nairobi . Also for all the support and organisation undertaken by all staff from the Aga Khan Hospital , Nairobi especially Zeenat Sulaiman. James Musela assisted us with day to day arrangements. Many thanks to them all.