News

Helping to reduce child deaths in Zambia

Published 12 April 2013

The University of Brighton has been awarded a £30,000 Government grant to help set up the first paediatric nursing course in Zambia where thousands of children die every year before their fifth birthdays.

The under 5 mortality rate in the Southern African country is 83 per 1000 - over 16 times that of the UK.

There is currently no post registration education provision for the care of children in Zambia and the university's project aims to provide nurses with the knowledge, skills and competence to care for sick infants and children admitted to hospital.

The grant to the university's School of Nursing and Midwifery was announced (in March) by Justine Greening MP, Secretary of State for International Development. The school will be working with the Lusaka School of Nursing and the Brighton-Lusaka Health Charity Link.

The minister told the University of Brighton: "British nurses, midwives and medical teams are among the best in the world. The Health Partnership Scheme allows us to harness their expertise to help give developing countries the skills needed to improve the health of some of the world's poorest people.

"Health partnerships will also mean the medical teams returning to the UK will have developed new transferable skills, training and experience as a result of their work in challenging and fast-moving circumstances.

"Britain won't stand on the sidelines when so many women die every day in pregnancy or childbirth and tackling the tragic scale of maternal and child deaths is a key priority for the British Government."

Students on the first critical care course in Zambia having neonatal life support training in the skills room within the Lusaka School of Nursing, UTH.

The University Teaching Hospital (UTH) in Lusaka, Zambia's capital, has 1,655 beds; 355 are paediatric beds within the children's wing with 20,000 – 30,000 paediatric admissions per year.

A 2008 study showed that of those children dying following admission to UTH 63 per cent occurred within 48 hours of admission. The absence of nurses trained in paediatrics has hindered Zambia`s ability to improve child survival and a main aim of the project will be to strengthen education and health systems to 'scale up' delivery of safe, accessible and high-quality care to children and young people admitted to hospital.

Some of the teaching will use modern communications. Jill Durrant, child health senior lecturer and project lead in the University of Brighton's School of Nursing and Midwifery, said: "Using email and Skype will enable the students to share reflections on clinical practice and this will also extend to nursing lecturers as well. The nursing students in Zambia are eager to learn and the project will enable them to buddy up with students here in the UK."

Alison Taylor (first left, bottom row), Paediatric Practice Development Nurse at Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust; and Jill Durrant (second from right, bottom row), with UTH nursing students on the first critical care course which completed earlier this year.

Eric Chisupa, Principal Lecturer at Lusaka Schools of Nursing (paediatrics), said: "We are delighted with the Government grant. It will help us improve nurses' education and will, we hope, help reduce the mortality rate among infants and children.

"For so many years our children in Zambia have been managed by general nurses and midwives, and this has, in some cases, resulted in them not receiving the best care. With the coming of the paediatric course we are certain that the children will benefit, and we all know that eventually the country will benefit too. The infant mortality rate will reduce. We can, therefore, never say thank you enough for this government grant."

Zambia is a low-middle income country and life expectancy is 46 for males and 50 for females; 85 per cent of the population live on less than $1 a day. Common diseases include HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, diarrhoea, and vaccine-preventable conditions including malaria and respiratory infections.

The new course will build on ties established in 2005 when the Brighton- Lusaka Health Link was set up between UTH and Brighton and Sussex University NHS Trust and Brighton and Sussex Medical School. The University of Brighton's School of Nursing and Midwifery joined the Link in 2007.