Zambia
Other Years
Zambia 2003
An exciting trip was made to Zambia in May 2003. We went to visit the regions to meet up with students from the course in Lusaka, September 2002. We travelled to Livingstone District Hospital and were able to spend the morning with the theatre staff and some students from other hospitals in the district. We were able to provide some practical advice as we made our benchmarking visit.
We were pleased that the Director of Nursing and one of the tutors from the School of Nursing were able to join us. The Director of the Hospital kindly agreed to give the certificates of attendance.
We drove back to Lusaka allowing us to see a great deal of Zambia which was fascinating and interesting to see the rural areas as well as the cities.
We flew up to the Copperbelt and were able to visit Kitwe Central Hospital Operating Theatres. A very enthusiastic and well informed Theatre Manager facilitated our theatre visit and we were able to exchange information and see for ourselves how little equipment an orthopaedic surgeon was having to manage with to mend a difficult humeral fracture. Here we also met the press and provided some background to our visit and dispelled myths about recruiting Zambian Nurses to work in UK!
We visited a private hospital which belonged to a mining company and was well equipped and well run. The staff had made many changes since they attended the course last year, and we consider this hospital to be a 'model for best practice' theatres in Zambia.
We spent our final day in the main Hospital in Lusaka University Teaching Hospital. We watched some general surgery, some obstetric surgery and assisted with an emergency... just, in the right place at the right time. We were pleased to meet up again with the Chief Nurse and Medical director of the Hospital. We met the tutors from the Theatre School and renewed our friendship with them. We were asked to speak to the 'class of 2003' and took a session entitled 'Why do we do it ? - Motivation for a career in Perioperative care!'
We made a brief visit to the Italian Hospital theatres where we were pleased to see that sharps are now discarded separately from other waste from the table. We were delighted to meet a nursing sister who had worked in Zambia since just after ? before the world war. We also went to a very shiny new theatre in a private hospital, whose matron was a student on our course and was very proud of the new facilities.