AMREF’s e-learning course for nurses created a quite a stir today at the ongoing Global Health Forum in Washington DC following a presentation on the innovative training programme during a session titled ‘What’s New: Using Technology to Benefit the Community’.
The presentation was made by Dr Peter Ngatia, Director for Capacity Building, and Adesuwa Akinboro, former e-Learning Manager at AMREF.
“Guided by our vision of better health for Africa, AMREF works to bring communities into the health system and to bring health systems to the communities. We want to close the gap between them so that every African has access to quality health services,” Dr Ngatia said to introduce AMREF to the large audience. “Consider this – 80 per cent of people in some countries go to traditional healers first, before going to a hospital, if they go to the hospital at all. How do we ensure that this large number of people who are currently outside the system get quality care?”
He went on to explain that one of the ways AMREF was working to strengthen health systems in Africa was to address the critical shortage of health workers through training. “In Africa, there is only one doctor to every 10,000 people, compared with one to 300 in the developed world, and one nurse for every 1,200 people compared with the WHO standard of one nurse for every 500 people.”
Adesuwa gave a history of the e-learning programme, which is a collaboration between the Nursing Council of Kenya, AMREF, the Ministry of Health and Accenture. In Kenya, the majority (66 per cent) of the 40,000 nurses are enrolled nurses, trained only to certificate level, yet they run many rural health facilities and are the first and sometimes only health worker that patients see.
Said Adesuwa: “The government urgently needed to upgrade 26,000 nurses to enable them to handle complex diseases and manage the rural facilities, but using traditional classroom methods would have taken 150 years. It needed a faster way to train the nurses, many of whom had waited 15 to 20 years to get into the nursing schools due to limited space.”
“E-learning provided the solution. Not only would the programme reduce the time and cost of training by upgrading all 26,000 nurses in just five years, it would also address the nursing shortage in the country and improve standards of nursing care, thus bringing us closer to the Millennium Development Goals. Moreover, the programme can easily be replicated in other countries and courses can be developed to train other cadres of health workers.”
The benefits of using e-learning over traditional training methods were numerous, Adesuwa said. The impact of leaving work to go to school would only have worsened the impact of the shortage of nurses, and so it made more sense to bring the course to the nurses at their places of work. Not only is the course flexible, allowing the students to study in their free time without reducing the quality of education, it gives the nurses IT valuable IT skills.
To date, the programme has enrolled 4,500 nurses in 29 nursing schools across the country. Over 420 computers have been installed in 103 centres, and 200 mentors have been trained to supervise the students. “The Nursing Council of Kenya has reported improved improvement in the knowledge, skills and attitudes, and improved nursing care from the students because they immediately put into practice what they are learning,” said Adesuwa.
There were numerous enquiries from participants about how to adapt the programme in their countries and programmes, which Dr Ngatia promised to follow up on. The well attended session was moderated by Susan Rainey of Forum One Communications, which uses the internet to influence policy issues and brings together 20,000 professionals to dialogue on the internet. Other speakers were Bobby Jefferson, Senior Health Care IT advisor with Constella Futures, and Lisa Russel, who uses film to advance public health issues.
Dr Daraus Bukenya, AMREF’s Director for Community Partnering, while acknowledging the value of information technology in improving health care and services, stressed the importance of introducing appropriate technology for the African context.
“Programmes must be designed and developed with governments and communities if they are to succeed. Western designs that are imposed on Africa without local input, no matter how sophisticated, are bound to fail. Introducing complex IT solutions in one segment of the health system to collect data on, say, HIV or malaria, will only create parallel systems with the government and other players, and in the end may do more harm than good, placing different sectors at different levels. We must look at strengthening health systems as the foundation for everything that we do, be it IT, care for patients or training.”
Read the presentation on AMREF’s e-learning course for nurses.
