BRASILIA, Brazil, CMC –Nursing instructors from six Caribbean countries and territories have recently participated in a training course in Brazil on clinical simulation, an educational methodology that recreates professional practice scenarios in a controlled, participatory, and interactive setting.
The Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO), which facilitated the course, said the training was promoted by the University of São Paulo’s Ribeirão Preto College of Nursing (EERP-USP), which is the collaborating center of PAHO and the World Health Organization (WHO) for the development of nursing research.
According to the director of the PAHO/WHO collaborating center, Carla Ventura, the training in Brazil “enabled the exchange of knowledge and tools so that Caribbean educators can implement clinical simulation techniques and methodologies to improve nursing education in their countries.”
“Within the clinical area of this project, which is crucial and necessary for nursing, we identified the need to establish simulation laboratories,” she said. “However, they are still in the process of acquiring these materials and organizing the physical structure in Guyana, and we saw the opportunity to create this course so that they could also get to know our reality.”
PAHO said the need to strengthen the training of nursing professionals is shared by many countries in the Caribbean region and the Americas that are facing human resource shortages.
The five Caribbean countries comprising the 22 nursing instructors who participated in the training and their counterparts in the Americas were Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.
PAHO said the nursing workforce is “one of the key elements for building resilient health systems that respond to the health needs of the population and advancing towards greater health equity.”
“Preparation of the simulation scenarios was one of the most important elements of the training,” PAHO said. “The instructors had the opportunity to construct scenarios that they had suggested, and that had been adapted to their countries’ needs.”
It said the methodology for constructing scenarios is based on the guidelines of the International Nursing Association for Clinical and Simulation Learning (INACSL).
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