Council discusses effective clinical training

The Nursing and Midwifery Council of Ghana has toured some health institutions in the Upper West Region and held stakeholders meetings with authorities of health institutions to discuss issues regarding effective clinical training of nurses.

Mr. Felix Nyante, Registrar, Nursing and Midwifery Council, Ghana, who was the head of the delegation, visited Wa, Jirapa, Lawra, Nandom and Tumu Nursing Training Schools to acquaint itself with challenges there, and also map out effective ways of promoting clinical training to bring out quality nurses.

At a stakeholder’s meeting in Wa, with principals, doctors, tutors and students, Mr. Nyante said it was the mandate of the Council to ensure that high standards and quality of nurses were not comprised at any time in their training.

He said the Council was fostering much more collaboration with hospitals and training institutions to set levels of standards in all training institutions, hospitals and other facilities.

In that regard, the Council was arranging with health training schools throughout the country to ensure change in clinical training for nurses to help maintain high standards at all times.

Mr Nyante said it has come to the notice of the Council that the current training system where all the schools go on session at the same time and the students found themselves crowded in health facilities for clinical training was not the best.

That practice, Mr. Nyante explained, have not been helpful to both patients and students because the patients needed a serene environment to have sufficient rest for healing processes to take place, while overcrowding was also a hindrance to students acquisition of clinical learning experience.

He said the Council was therefore collaborating with stakeholders and other authorities to ensure that training schools would not go on vacation at the same time and reopen at the same time.

“The Council is working out with schools to map out clinical areas as against the number of institutions and students population to ensure that whilst some students are in school studying, others are also undergoing clinical training in the facilities,” Mr. Nyante explained.

With that arrangement, the Council and the training institutions would identify institutions; know the number of students in each of the institutions and the number of hospital bed capacity to help facilitate the distribution of students to the facilities to enhance quality clinical training.

“At a point in time, you have so many students in the wards, and that does not help in clinical training of the students. Principals should show leadership roles for students to acquire the best of training”.

Mr. Nyante said it was in the interest of the council to know the type of training that was being provided at health training institutions because the school alone could not train good nurses and the hospitals could not also train good nurse, but a combination of tutors and hospitals, “while the patient is our focus and target”.

“You are training but you are not helping us. You have behaviour as managers but not leaders why should schools close at the same time, and all trainees go to hospitals for clinical at the same time?

“This type of training is not realistic and beneficiary to students and we need a paradigm shift in our academic pursuance to address challenges of clinical training,” Mr Nyante said.

The Council commended Lawra Hospital for the zeal the nurses and doctors were working with and considered it as the most patient friendly hospital in the Region.

Meanwhile, the Council has issued a strong warning to some private health training institutions in the Region which were setup without any accreditation from the Nursing and Midwifery Council to do the right thing.

Mr Nyante said the Council would sanction schools that were operating illegally and warned the public to be wary of them.