Day 300: Wrapping Up

     I'm sitting in my office at the hospital wondering how on earth I'm going to finish all the work I have to get done in so little time. I say this as I stare at the 3" binder that I've filled with material from the first three years of this program. There are very few HRH staff members coming to CHUB in Year 4, so I have been trying to make things as easy as possible for not only new staff, but also the Rwandans to take over many of the tasks that we've done. BLS has been successful, but there are always days I have my doubts.
     This 3" binder that I've essentially filled beyond capacity is all of our student nurse teaching session material. In year 1 of the program the nurse educators decided to teach the students all together once a week. Over the years this has continued and is primarily what we call TBL, or Team Based Learning. It's an interesting concept and one that really works well here as a teaching method. Long story short, the students receive an article the week before on the next week's topic. They are to read the article and be prepared to take a quiz when they come to class on that topic. The interesting thing is that we have them take the quiz twice. Once individually and then again in a group. It's pretty interesting to watch as they huddle in their groups hoping to be the first one with all the correct answers so that they win some bon-bons. The method allows the students to debate the answers until they all come to a consensus about why the answer should be A and not C (and sometimes ultimately why the answer ended up being B) and teach/learn from each other. It's a pretty cool process to watch.
     After all the groups are done and the quiz is reviewed and all answers explained, we generally give a lecture on the topic. Sometimes we give an article and no quiz, sometimes we do skills practice like with BLS. Regardless, the students really seem to enjoy it. At one point about a month ago we had five different nursing schools and roughly 75 students in the hospital. Bribed by chocolate, they all would show for class.
     This binder looks glorious and I'm excited to be done with it. But 95% of the time I wonder if the material will ever be used again. I have spent about 2 weeks emailing former HRH nurses for lectures, articles, and quizzes; then I've formatted everything to be consistent, written an easy-to-follow guide for each topic, including contact information for the Rwandans who perhaps taught the topic to the students before and reasoning for why the topics should be taught in a specific order. I have written or modified lectures on topics where PowerPoints were never recovered. Julie, Medie, and I have had multiple meetings with Désiré, the Training and Research Manager, about becoming more involved in the teaching sessions and how to organize the lectures for the students. And sometimes I'm extremely hopeful about the continuation of the once a week 2-hour sessions. Other times, I am left wondering.

Melody and I in March with some of the students

My twin, Emmanuel and I teaching Neuro assessment in March

The glorious binder than may or may not ever be used.
Fingers crossed.

Lessons Learned:
1) Sometimes your work ends up being fruitful, other times fruitless. But regardless of the end result, you have to approach everything with a positive attitude and hope for the best.