Forum member breathes new life into overseas programme

RCN Children and Yound People's Acute Care Forum member Jason Gray has recently returned from Zambia after assisting with the delivery of paediatric advanced life support training for nurses and doctors

The courses were provided over two weeks in September 2011 with the initial aim of training medical and nursing staff from Lusaka to provide paediatric advanced life support (APLS) courses to nursing and medical colleagues in the future.

Getting training in place

Jason, a paediatric nurse consultant, complemented a small team of medical and nursing colleagues from the UK and South Africa to deliver two APLS courses and one generic instructor course (GIC) in an effort to ensure longevity of future paediatric resuscitation training within Zambia.

From an initial scoping exercise it was identified that there was no training for doctors or nurses in paediatric resuscitation in Zambia. Also, the APLS/GIC project complemented an ongoing Lusaka-Brighton link project funded by Education Partnerships in Africa, a programme managed by the British Council that had already developed a critical care nursing curriculum for the treatment of adults.

The courses were pre-administered by the Advanced Life Support Group (ALSG) in Manchester using data supplied by Brighton and Sussex University NHS Trust as part of a charity bid from the British Council and the Tropical Health Education Trust (THET), associated with a planned introduction of APLS to Zambia in conjunction with the paediatric department at Zambia’s University Teaching Hospital.

Success and looking to the future

Training equipment was transported from the UK as part of the charity bid, and it is destined to remain in Lusaka as part of the continuation commitment to the training programme. The team of instructors from the UK and South Africa managed to successfully train 23 clinicians and create 11 new instructors with a possible further nine instructor potentials who will undertake instructor training this spring.