Nurses comprise a key component to maternal and newborn health care delivery, including the care of 'at-risk' or sick newborns. However, the efficiency and effectiveness of services rely heavily on adequate numbers of highly skilled neonatal nurses. Currently, in India, a significant shortage of trained nurses in the field of newborn care is contributing to poor neonatal outcomes. Specifically, nurses caring for newborns lack the competency and experience needed to ensure optimal care. This deficiency has been linked to a lack of expert faculty, standardized training and minimal or no exposures to newborn clinical care areas during pre service education. Moreover, in addition to a lack of operational research in the area, nurses who provide care for newborns are often faced with numerous system related issues that impede their ability to provide optimal care. Most notably, frequent changes of work place, poor wages, and lack of continuing education, skill maintenance, recognition, and collaborative team culture further compromise the nursing care. All these lead to poor motivation and competency. To meet this challenge, it is essential that emphasis be placed on the identification and support of nursing faculty with expertise in newborn and neonatal care who are able to ensure that nurses receive standardized education for pre-service, in-service and ongoing care. In addition, importance should be placed on encouraging newborn nursing research as well as on governmental increases in salary compensation. Lastly, given the shortage of physicians to take care of sick neonates in remote areas, the creation of a cadre of Neonatal nurse practitioner/ advanced practice nurses would be an invaluable solution in developing countries. Furthermore, centralized oversight of newborn education and training would be best served, if responsibility was placed with Reproductive maternal newborn child health (RMNCH) workers and district level officers.
Aim
To gain ideas and information from healthcare providers to optimize the education and clinical practices of nurses caring for sick or at‐risk newborns in India.
Background
Improving infant survival has been identified as a Millennium Development Goals; however, India still faces many challenges with 3.1 million neonatal deaths and 2.6 million stillbirths annually. Skilled nursing care has been associated with decreased morbidity and mortality in newborns. However, core competencies in newborn care education and training are lacking for nurses.
Methods
Qualitative data were collected from 12 focus groups with 101 newborn care providers from three areas of India as well as from a 2‐day stakeholders' meeting. Data analysis was undertaken using descriptive and thematic content analysis.
Results
Perceived challenges included limited manpower and high nurse turnover, lack of access to evidence‐based orientation to newborn care and problems with access to appropriate learner‐based, neonatal training. Relevant, ongoing education opportunities, led by nursing leaders were identified to be important solutions.
Conclusion
Findings provide insight into the current healthcare system in India with specific reference to the nursing care of at‐risk newborns. There is a lack of existing resources to provide standardized and specific orientation curricula for nurses.
Implications for Nursing and Health Policy
Policy makers in health and education need to: support and enact learner‐based orientation and continuing educational opportunities as well as ongoing competency‐based education programmes; encourage nurse leader involvement and support; and provide sustainable system‐related supports. Nurses and other health providers need to work together to influence government policy.
Background: The outbreak of COVID 19 led to the closure of all educational institutions worldwide. The teachers and students had to face a number of challenges because of the sudden change in the educational system and to ensure safety of public. To assess the satisfaction of nursing teachers with Web-Based teaching after the shift from traditional teaching to online teaching in the COVID 19 and related restrictionsMethods: An online survey was conducted amongst the teachers working in various nursing colleges in the Northern region of India. Standarized scale, an Online Faculty Satisfaction Survey (OFSS) consisting of 36 questions was used to collect the data through google form. The teachers were provided the online link on their WhatsApp or email to fill-up the questionnaire. One hundred fifty-nine teachers responded back. Ethical aspects were given due considerations.Results: The mean age (years) ±S.D. of the participants was 34±10.1. Maximum (96.2) were females. Majority (93.1) of the teachers were satisfied with online teaching. Only 3.8% teachers were highly satisfied with online teaching. Around 3/4th agreed that they are satisfied with the online environment's flexibility and that the technology for online teaching is reliable. The most liked features/advantages were the ability to take courses even in this global pandemic. The least liked feature/disadvantages were poor connectivity in remote areas, technical problems, unsafe and losing personal information, lack of face-to-face interaction, and difficulty assessing students' response and attention.Conclusions: Most of the teachers were satisfied with online teaching though few reported about connectivity problems. There is a need to develop various institutional mechanisms viz structured training, technical support, and effective online evaluation systems to run the online educational system properly.
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