At the time of the project (May 2020), Zambia was in the containment stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their experience of previous infectious outbreaks (Cholera outbreak 2018) has taught them that preparation, including enhancing staffing knowledge and expertise is key to controlling the spread of disease. They were urgently looking for ways to up-skill their healthcare workers for what is likely to be rapidly increasing need.
The strong institutional partnership which includes regular virtual meetings, led to this request to help design, develop and implement a context specific training package. This was possible because previous partnership projects focused on improving critical care education, training and practice, and it is internationally accepted that a relatively high percentage of COVID-19 patients require critical care. In consequence, there was a need to rapidly up-skill healthcare workers to manage patients of varying dependency outside of the critical care environment. The workforce has had to encompass the student population.
Project aims
To develop a context specific COVID-19 training package for healthcare workers at the Lusaka College of Nursing and Midwifery and The University Teaching Hospitals.
Who completed the project?
- Professor Joy Notter
- Chris Carter
Who are we working with?
This project was funded by the Tropical Health & Education Trust.
THET Blog
Looking back...looking forward: the impact of COVID-19
Final outcome
Successful delivery of the project within the timeframe set.
- Zoom subscription has supported virtual meetings throughout the pandemic.
- Nurse educators at LUCON trained not just trained in Moodle, but also how to upload, edit and deliver programmes via Moodle.
- IT personnel given additional training on mentoring nurse educators in the use of Moodle, to support teaching staff and provide ongoing guidance and technical advice.
- All nurse educators given additional training in Covid-19 specific prevention, identification and nursing response strategies.
- Additional bonus outputs:
- Hand hygiene practical provided an innovative student centred learning activity.
- Hand hygiene training equipment now embedded into Objective Structured Clinical Examinations.
- IT personnel now supporting transfer of additional programmes onto Moodle.
- Submission to the WHO learning hub.
- Blog written with partners for THET.
Staff trained:
- 28 healthcare staff attended the strategic development of the training materials and e-learning platform.
- 60 nurse educators and staff attended train the trainers workshops
- 973 students attended training workshops