Today is International women’s day

Posted on by niche_admin in Education

Dr Alison Earley

It’s a day for dressing up in much of the world, a day to celebrate the work women do to make the world go round, a day of empowerment. The picture here is of Cameroonian women on International Women’s Day in 2018, learning how to resuscitate babies dressed in their International Women’s Day material that they make into powerfully beautiful dresses every year. We should make more of it in the UK really.

There are many achievements to celebrate on International Women’s Day, but we mustn’t forget that in resource poor areas of the world, maternal mortality (death related to pregnancy and childbirth) is still 5 – 10 times higher than in richer countries.

Many mothers still give birth in unclean or unsafe places, and without skilled help or adequate facilities.   This has a direct result on the survival of their babies; two of the leading causes of neonatal mortality are infection and intra-partum related events.

Education for healthcare workers and sustainable improvements in maternal and newborn care are the key to improving this situation.   NICHE International has a mission to improve the care of newborn babies, by the training we give and by supporting nurses, doctors and midwives to maintain their skills and improve the care they give to mothers and babies.

Training (predominantly female) nurses and midwives to be instructors on the Neonatal Care Course (NCC) empowers them to “Choose to Challenge” and make changes to their own healthcare systems from the bottom up.

Miller’s hierarchy of learning

Posted on by niche_admin in Education

Dr Jarlath O’Donohoe

To truly know whether our learners are achieving what we want them to achieve we should assess them in the setting that we expect these skills to be delivered.

Miller’s pyramid depicts four levels of learning which a student of a subject must pass through to truly perform: “knows”, “knows how”, “shows how” and “does”.

In the Neonatal Care Course, our novice learners gather facts and take an MCQ paper to “show that they know”. Workshops, discussion groups, skills sessions and simulations get them to the orange and green levels. The local champion and trained instructors then take over from NICHE for the “Performance Integrated into Practice” level at the top of the pyramid, completing the trainees’ journey from novice to expert.

I would like to see time better represented in this model. International NICHE instructors can skim the surface of the first 3 bands in one course but to achieve the competence and automacity inherent in the blue band at the top of the hierarchical model requires time, experience and supervised practice that only a local faculty can contribute to.