Mentoring ACLS Instructors in Nepal 2015 – CCNEPal invites – YOU!

What has CCNEPal done?

CCNEPal has been teaching ACLS skills in Nepal since 2011 and in that time we have given certificates to about 1,600 nurses and doctors who have taken the 3-day (nurses) or 2-day (doctors) course. We have made a number of road trips outside the Kathmandu Valley, and some of the most memorable sessions took place in those locations.

We are looking for nurses and doctors who want more experience teaching this program. Why not you?

The heart and soul of an ACLS class is the small group work and the debriefing that takes place afterwards. This class has less sit-down-and-take-notes time than any other class regularly taken by health professionals. It’s a scenario-based experience that allows the participants to experience a simulated emergency and then gauge their response. Yes, we work on the protocols and drugs, but this is only part of the whole. Each small group is coached by one of the “assistant” for the class as they go through the scenarios, then there is discussion and feedback.

Coaching, discussion and debriefing are useful clinical skills which need to be developed under the guidance of a mentor. You don’t have to be a super-qualified clinical wizard to be an effective coach.

The Long Term Goal for Nepal Health Care

In order to improve acute care of hospitalized patients, the long term goal is for every hospital, every nursing school and certainly every medical school to develop their own system of teaching this course. It needs to be “owned” by everybody! There are a few that already do ( Bir, Patan, Grande, SGNHC, MMCVTC)  but even those places need to expand the list of participants to include a large batch of nurses as well as doctors from more than just the anesthesiology department.  A larger group of hospitals has collaborated with CCNEPal  to host the training, but not all have taken the next step , which is to designate local personnel to develop to the point where they take it over.

And so, the Invitation

CCNEPal will be conducting about fifteen sessions of the course before the principal faculty returns to USA May 30th. For each session, we work with up to five “assistants” who are coached in the techniques of scenarios, debriefing and feedback. If you wish to learn how the course is run, please contact us and arrange to be an “assistant.”

We would prefer each assistant to have previously taken the course. Also, to be an assistant you need to come for the whole three days. Hey – come for more than one session!

Contact us by sending an email to joeniemczura@gmail.com or else a message on the CCNEPal FaceBook page.

One final note:  The ACLS course offered by CCNEPal is based on the “official course” of the American Heart Association (AHA), but it is NOT the “official AHA course.” It has been adapted to the clinical practices of Nepal. We give a certificate that has little Nepali flags on it, and we conduct as much of it in Nepali bhasa as we can. The knowledge may have been packaged by the Americans, but it belongs to everybody on the planet.