Shahid Rafiq, MD
Chair APPNA MERIT
Noormahal Kabani, MD
Co-Chair Nursing Initiative and Critical Care
Shahid Rafiq MD, Chair APPNA MERIT
Noormahal Kabani MD, Co-Chair Nursing Initiative and Critical Care
For the past couple of years, Health Care leadership in Pakistan is more focused not only on dire shortage of nursing in Pakistan but also on the training of specialty nursing and nursing leadership as well as developing different roles for career growth in the Nursing profession including advanced practitioners. This has been expressed in various meetings with leadership of APPNA MERIT. Thus, during the First International APPNA MERIT Conference on Family Practice in Rawalpindi Medical University, on March 4-5, 2020, we had one full session on Nursing. This was a huge success and we decided to play our role in this endeavor by forming a Nursing chapter in APPNA MERIT.
We have formed a group of elite leadership in Nursing from Pakistan, UK and North America. We have involved the Nursing leaders of various universities including Agha Khan University which has played a major role in the quality Nursing in Pakistan. We have collaboration with Pakistan Nursing council as well as Pakistan Nursing Federation. Many nurses of Pakistani origin in various elite universities of the US have joined this effort. We have decided to focus on three main pathways.
1- Nursing Leadership training and faculty development
2- Public Health and Community Nursing playing a major role in the MERIT Initiative of Family Practice support in Pakistan.
3- Specialty Nursing training and education. First group will be Critical Care Nursing followed by Stroke Nurses and ER Nurses.
On July 11, 2020 APPNA Merit presented the first session of Merit Nursing Webinar series for COVID -19 to a live international audience. This webinar series is the first nursing education initiative for Pakistan by APPNA MERIT. It is focused on nurses new to the Intensive Care unit environment during the current pandemic.
This is to be followed by a much more dedicated and focused effort to enhance the skills of the nurses already accustomed to the Critical Care setting.
The Merit Nursing Webinar event was inaugurated by Dr Rafat Jan, First Nurse President of Pakistan Nursing Council, Dr Naheed Usmani, APPNA President and Dr Shahid Rafiq, Chair, APPNA MERIT. Mr. Ervin Massinga, Acting PDAS/DAS for Pakistan, State SCA Bureau was the guest speaker. We are now working with him on providing the much-needed equipment for noninvasive ventilation in Pakistan.
The Merit Nursing Webinar series for Covid-19 was the result of a diligent effort by highly qualified, experienced nurse educators in Pakistan and North America who came together in a
very short, (4 week) period at the request of the Intensivists at APPNA MERIT. It is a course focused on how a nurse might approach patient care in this new environment, offering some familiarity with the equipment and thinking processes along with imparting the essential knowledge to aid in understanding the role of an ICU nurse. A discussion board for nurses has also been created for further Covid-19 management support.
So far, we have received a very positive response from the nurses attending. So much so, that we have now decided to not only add another 15 minutes to each webinar but also another session to the series extending it by an additional week.
Some of the comments on the evaluation are:
“I like this webinar, and hope to learn more about critical care nursing skills and techniques”
“Systematic approach to provide nursing care”
“Your program is really informative and important for us”
“We created a group just for this course and assign tasks from it”
Going forward, our strategy is to follow “Train the Trainer Model” and support and nurture the future nurse educators in Pakistan in Critical Care. Hence our second educational initiative is a 3-month long course called, “Fundamentals of Critical Care Nursing”. The focus of this course is to enhance the skills of nurses already accustomed to the Critical Care environment. The emphasis is on imparting skills to provide safe, effective care while using critical thinking, sound clinical judgement, evidence-based nursing processes and a multidisciplinary team approach to improve patient outcomes.
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