April 16 2011 update regarding Nepal summer 2011

And now the blogging about my 2011 trip starts in earnest. I have been planning this since January – no, I have really had the idea in the back of my head for two years, but started putting in on paper then. The plan is to work with Lalitpur Nursing Campus in Patan as my host agency and to teach a critical care nursing course to as manay nurses from Nepal as I possibly can reach, this summer. I will live in patan but make side trips to other parts of the country. The baisc course will be a once-a-week all day lecture event at LNC, but there will also be some day spent making clinical rounds at various hospitals in Kathmandu with smaller groups. My strategy in publicizing the course was to set up a facebook event page, and this attracted the attention of hundreds of nurses and nursing students in Nepal. Many of these were from other parts of the country, and have requested that i make this available wherever they are, so I have been planning this as well. So far I have been asked if I would take an abbreviated version of the course to Chitwan; Bhaktapur; Bhairawha; Myagdi; Pokhara; and Okhaldunga.

The abbrievated version will be a three-day course, and I will be able to deliver it at the outlying areas.

There are many ways to think about elevating the standards for critical care in a low-income country. The first thing you (the reader) needs to know is that the nursing education system of Nepal is very much focused on “functional nursing” – in which people are taught to do the tasks of nursing, but not necessarily taught or allowed to put the tasks together into a cherent whole. The hospitals, as well,are set up to deliver care using this model. So, to teach critical care skills is to imipart a different way of thinking. The vast majority of nursing students are trained at the “PCL” level – sort of the equivalent of the Associate’s Degree here in the USA. Nowadays, there is more emphasis on getting a BN degree, which may only be commenced after two years of clinical practice. Often, the faculty of the schools of nursing are young recent graduates of a PCL program and it is only recently that more nurses with BN degrees are becoming faculty. This leads to a dilemma, whcih is that the faculty are trying to teach methods that they themselves have never practiced.One of my goals is to improve the ability of BN-prepared nurses to deliver new concepts of bedside nursing.

I could go on and on, but that’s enough for today.