Health worker training in PNG: Time to rethink

ABSTRACT

@#After 20 years of in-service training in child health, involving many different WHO and UNICEF courses: the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI), Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF), Severe acute malnutrition (SAM), Early Essential Newborn Care (EENC) and many others, it is time to consider what model of training is efficient and sustainable. Such a training model will need to address the complexities of child health in Papua New Guinea (PNG) in the era of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and provide health workers with a program of continuing professional development (CPD). Efficient models of training will have a common framework and integrate the best of these individual courses, and involve modern information technology to improve efficiency, be easily updatable and enlarge access. Training should be flexible and modular so that it can be delivered as an in-service course, a program of CPD within a hospital, or as self-learning. It should involve the principles of adult learning, enabling health workers to build on their existing knowledge and skills, to learn how to use standard up-to-date texts and technical resources in everyday clinical practice, and to understand where and how to access quality, credible health information. In-service training and CPD should involve and support PNG’s schools and colleges of nursing, HEOs and community health worker training, with the Paediatric Society, the School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS) University of PNG, and the National Department of Health (NDoH) taking the lead. A course that integrates the best of the existing WHO and UNICEF courses could form the basis of a post-graduate child health nursing diploma, which could be established in more provinces to address the shortage of paediatric nurses