The project partners strive to develop technical skills and training of the staff at the National Institute of Public Health. More specifically, this will involve training for lecturers, persons who organise courses, the management of the institute and the healthcare administrators at the Ministry of Health to help them master teaching practices adapted to the realities in Africa.
Furthermore, the curriculum for training nursing staff will be created in conjunction with the various players in the education and healthcare sectors. Meetings will also be organised to provide information and to raise awareness of the new methods of training.
The second set of activities will take place at the School of Public Health at the University of Kinshasa. These will take the form of participative workshops which will aim to provide an analysis of the framework of skills and professions in the healthcare system in Senegal. This will focus in particular on other job profiles (e.g. laboratory workers, physiotherapists) involving basic paramedical and social training. In a second part, the skills of the lecturers and trainers with respect to teaching practices will be improved with the emphasis on interactive training designed for this purpose. This will take account of he context of the situation in Africa and will be carried out in the framework of continuous training.
Finally, the School of Public Health will carry out research in the field of teaching practices and quality of care and will improve, in particular, the curriculum for basic training of nurses and doctors at the University of Kinshasa.
By adapting the healthcare training programmes to bring them into line with the everyday requirements of the job and healthcare regulations in Burundi, Senegal and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the project will achieve better training for nurses, lecturers in nursing, doctors, lecturers in medicine as well as the staff in the institutions’ administration departments.
The courses, based on the real situations faced by healthcare professionals, will be made up of modules and activities that can be directly transferred into everyday practical situations. This will result in more skilled healthcare professionals who are confident in their abilities, better prepared to work in the health centres and to deal with the actual situation found in the region. This will help to reduce the “brain drain” in the field of healthcare, which is a problem faced by all African countries.
In the long-term, the local populations will be the ultimate beneficiaries of the improvement in the quality of primary healthcare services. The project will also increase the trust of the populations in healthcare workers by promoting the recognition of the quality of training in primary care by beneficiaries.
