Building the capacity of nursing professionals in Cambodia: Insights from a bridging programme for faculty development

Abstract

To upgrade nursing instruction capacity in Cambodia, two bridging programmes were opened for the Bachelor of Science in Nursing simultaneously in-country and out-of-country (Thailand). A descriptive qualitative study was conducted to assess effectiveness of both programmes jointly and to explore needs concerning the further development of nursing education. This study included interviews with 34 current or previous programme participants (nursing instructors or hospital preceptors) and 10 managers of collaborating institutions. New learning content, personal outcomes, challenges and obstacles and future needs were qualitatively coded to create categories and subcategories of data. Findings show that programme participants were most influenced by the new content areas (e.g. nursing theory and professionalism), active teaching-learning strategies and the fulltime educational immersion afforded by the out-of-country programme. Programme participants who had returned to their workplaces also identified on-going needs for employing new active teaching-learning approaches, curriculum revision, national standardization of nursing curricula and improvements in the teaching-learning infrastructure. Another outcome of this study is the development of a theoretical model for Nursing Capacity Building in Developing Countries that describes the need for intermediate and long-term planning as well as using both Bottom-Up and Edge-Pulling strategies.

Capacity Development in an Undergraduate Nursing Program in Vietnam

“…In this study, the main areas of faculty training in previous research were upgrading knowledge and skills, teaching method, transforming theory into practice, research ability, leadership, and clinical education capacity as demonstrated in previous studies (3, 4, 6). Throughout this project, nursing curriculum redesign was focused on competency improvement of nursing graduates and problem-based learning as a new teaching method as demonstrated by Ghalenoei et al (17).…”

“…However, there has been very little research on governance or administration training for nurses; it was good for capacity building through bottom-up and participatory approaches in project implementation. Koto et al (4) and Shin et al (16) highlighted the role of a self-governance body in a partner country as a way of bottom-up decision making. Though the formation of a nursing curriculum committee of this project was top-down rather than bottom-up, the members were very energetic and enthusiastic in making changes adopting problem-based teaching and learning methods.…”

“…These recommendations were also applied to a low-resource setting country; however, it would be very difficult to improve a health care system without human resource development. Much research on nursing program evaluation has examined general programs; however, the results of previous studies by Njie et al (3), Koto et al (4), Kang (5), and Kang, et al (6) revealed that only a few studies were focused on global health or global health nursing.…”

“…The term “capacity development” in this article refers to the process by which faculty and organizations get, improve, and maintain the skills and knowledge needed for curriculum development, teaching, and guiding nursing students in keeping with the global nursing educational standards (4). The effectiveness of a nursing program as outcomes of graduates' competencies can be achieved by the development of faculty competencies and environmental capacity.…”

Long-term outcomes of a program to upgrade the nursing faculty in Cambodia: a qualitative study

“…According to Kirkpatrick's model, we assessed their 2) learning and 3) behavior and found the bene ts with both professional nursing practice and teaching after completing the upgrading courses. However, the immediate post-training study focused only on individual behavior outcomes, and we found these trainees were not well accepted by their nursing colleagues and other health professionals at their workplaces [10]. In this longterm, post-training study, we aimed to evaluate the 3) behavior and 4) results as long-term outcomes of these two training programs and identify in uencing factors by emphasizing institutional development of education and clinical facilities.…”