A Good Week

When it comes to training, you have to be culturally sensitive- if you don’t do things the African way, you will accomplish nothing. Take the nurses for example. They like structured, formal teaching with an exam and a certificate of attendance at the end. This is precisely what they got...

As you know, I have been running a few teaching sessions this week in:

1. Recognition, assessment and management of the sick patient
2. Use of obs and urine charts

Today, through popular request, I set a small test. Twenty sisters sat it and with the exception of four (who only began attending from Thursday), everyone passed.

I issued certificates of attendance to all that passed and encouraged the late arrivals to attend next week- it is difficult to give a certificate of attendance when you haven’t attended!

Next week, the sisters and I will all be training the junior nurses the same thing and we will also be showing them how to measure pulse, temperature, blood pressure, respiratory rate and conscious level. At the moment only the ward sisters and doctors know how to do these observations and this is part of the reason why there are no observation charts- hardly anyone can do observations, let alone fill in the charts...

I have made good friends with all the ward sisters. I thought I would include a photo of them all after our teaching today:

All the best,

David xx