Benefiting from technical assistance at global and local levels to improve the nursing workforce

Nursing faculty in the U.S. partnered with a NGO and Kenyan project team to help Kenyan faculty learn to use new clinical lab equipment and different pedagogic approaches in their skills lab to help improve nursing education in public health and acute care settings. Innovative equipment such as human patient simulators may not be used effectively without considering diffusion of innovation theory. This presentation explores how U.S. faculty partnered with Kenyan colleagues to expand their skills lab with new equipment including a birthing human patient simulator, an infant simulator, and teaching learning resources for home and clinic use. Despite spending considerable time planning before the trip, we solidified mutually identified objectives for the skills lab training on our first day of the two week training. Together we unpacked the new equipment and everyone set up each new piece of equipment and practiced using it. Kenyan colleagues provided leadership throughout the workshop and we adhered to local cultural practices in a shared learning environment where faculty developed and practiced high and low fidelity simulations for different clinical settings. At the end of the two week training we assessed how well we had met the training objectives and identified action steps for the “way forward.” We will describe the valuable lessons we learned from our Kenyan colleagues that we can apply locally and provide recommendations for partnering with global colleagues based on our reflection and analysis of how well the action steps were met one year following the training in Kenya.