Tagged / international collaboration

Promoting Nursing CPD in Nepal

Bournemouth University facilitated a Strategic planning meeting to develop a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Framework for Nepal last week in Kathmandu. The planning meeting was held on 30th July 2019 at the Institute of Medicine IOM Maharajgunj Nursing Campus.  Midwifery is not formally recognised in Nepal, i.e. as a profession separate from nursing, therefore when refer to nursing CPD in this blog we mean both ‘nurses’ and ‘nurse-midwives’.

Bournemouth University is collaborating in this project with Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) in the UK, the IOM Nursing Campus, the Nursing Association of Nepal (NAN), MIDSON, the Nepal Nursing Council (NNC) and several other key stakeholders in Nepal to support nursing regulatory bodies to establish mandatory CPD and/or post-registration training programmes relevant to their current practice in nursing. 

The Bournemouth team (led by Dr. Bibha Simkhada with Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen and Dr.Pramod Regmi) argued that CPD offers nurses the opportunity to maintain, improve and broaden knowledge, expertise and develop their personal and professional qualities to enhance practice and career development. Nepal has had limited process and progress in ensuring CPD for nurses and the uptake of post-registration education and training  programmes or CPD tends to be ad hoc.  Generally, CPD in Nepal remains under-developed as showing evidence of having received CPD is not currently a requirement of nurses when they re-register every five year.

This project is a good example of a BU FUSION project as our earlier Research in the form of a needs assessment will to the introduction of CPD which is of course, post-registration Education in nursing, helping to improve Practice in a low-income country.  We think we have had at least some impact on nursing in Nepal as the general feeling of our strategic planning meeting positive towards introducing CPD in the near future in Nepal.

 

 

New Partner Search on Participant Portal

The European Commission’s Participant Portal new Partner Search is now ready to use. This search allows you to find potential partners for your research project, based on organisations already registered on the Portal and in receipt of funding. As part of this, there is a useful overview of the organisation and its interaction with European funding schemes. Access is also given to top level information about funded projects.

The Partner Search can be found under the How to Participate tab and can be used whether you are logged in or not.
 
The Partner Search allows you to search by organisation name, a key word or topic. There is also the option to filter by country, organisation type or programme. If you see a partner you would like to find out more about, you can click on the organisations name to go to their page.

On the organisation page you can find a blurb of the organisation and a full list of key words. Note that some of these have been entered manually and some are taken automatically from the European funded projects the organisation has.

To help see potential network opportunities, further down the page you can see information on who the main collaboration partners are for that organisation and the type of role it usually holds in a project. Finally there is a list of all the European Commission funded projects that the organisation has and a link to contact that project team direct.

This tool complements the other partner searches already available. Why not have a look and see who has funded projects in your field?

 

First BU paper Prof. McConnell

Alison McConnell 2016FHSS Professor Alison McConnell just published her latest paper ‘Inspiratory muscle training improves breathing pattern during exercise in COPD patients’  with her international co-authors from Belgium and Thailand.  The paper concludes that the addition of inspiratory muscle training to a pulmonary rehabilitation programme in COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) patients with inspiratory muscle weakness resulted in a deeper and slower breathing pattern during exercise. Patients could achieve significantly higher peak work rate and exercise ventilation without increasing dyspnoea sensation.

Prof. McConnell is also author of Breathe Strong, Perform Better as well as Respiratory Muscle Training: Theory & Practice.

Congratultions,

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

Mental health & maternity care in Nepal: THET-funded training

group work NawalparasiIMG_6649

A few days I posted a short report of our first session as part of the THET-funded project ‘Mental Health Training for Community-based Maternity Providers in Nepal’, see this previous post here.  Yesterday we completed the final third day training of the first session of this BU-led project.  Over three days we had 70 ANMs (Auxiliary Nurse Midwives) in attendance, which we think is (nearly) all such staff based in all birthing centres in the district (=province).  The three days were the same, i.e. each session was repeated twice so each day one third of the ANMs could attend, and two-third could be at work in the birthing centre ensuring women could deliver safely.

logo THETAs part of this project we send UK volunteers (health and/or education) experts to Nepal to offer high quality training in areas where it is most needed.  Further detail on this BU-led THET project can be found in our scientific paper Mental health issues in pregnant women in Nepal  published in the Nepal Journal of Epidemiology available through Open Access.  Mental illness is still very much a taboo topic in Nepal as it has often a serious stigma attached to it.  Moreover, the relatively short training of ANMs is often fairly basic and the national curriculum does not cover mental health issues in any detail.  This joint project between Bournemouth University, Liverpool John Mooores University, Tribhuvan University and the local charity Green Tata Nepal addresses issues about mental health in general and in pregnant women and new mothers in particular.  Tribhuvan University is the oldest university in Nepal and one of the ten largest universities in the world (based on student numbers).  The project is multi-disciplinary involving midwives, (mental health) nurses, and doctors as well as global health researchers, educationalists and sociologists.

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH