NAMIBIA

PRONTO International in Namibia

nambia-sm

Number of Participants Trained: 60+

Collaborators and Partners: The International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH)


PRONTO was invited from I-TECH in 2013 to partner with the University of Namibia School of Nursing to create a new training curriculum for pre-service nurses, emphasizing application of knowledge in a clinical setting through skills stations and simulation. The state of healthcare and medical education in Namibia has been under intense scrutiny over the past few years, which resulted in an official inquiry into the state of health services in August of 2012 by Namibia’s President. It was found that the healthcare system is suffering from inadequate care facilities and health professionals. A severe shortage of medical professionals, nurses in particular, was identified during this inquiry. The acute nursing shortages, which pre-dated the report’s findings and which include shortages of nursing faculty at UNAM School of Nursing and Public Health, are being addressed by a plan to rapidly increase the number of graduating registered nurses.

The University of Namibia requested technical assistance from I-TECH in 2010 to address this shortage of nurses. As part of this technical assistance, PRONTO was engaged as a partner and expert in medical simulation in low-resource settings. Through this collaborative relationship between I-TECH and PRONTO with the University of Namibia, a new training curriculum was created to meet the needs of pre-service nursing students. The curriculum was piloted in 2013, and again in February 2014.

PRONTO and I-TECH are in current talks to implement PRONTO in Namibia in 2014. To date, over 60 (???) nursing students have been trained with PRONTO’s modified pre-service curriculum.