More Nurses in the Right Places: CapacityPlus Celebrates International Nurses Day and Takes Part in ICN Congress

May 10, 2013
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“I became a health worker to help our brothers and sisters, everyone who’s sick,” says Nurse Alphonsine Nyangé, who works in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “I really had the passion to take care of the sick,” echoes Nurse Mariam Louise Walusimbi in Uganda.

On May 12 CapacityPlus salutes these dedicated nurses and so many others like them around the world, in celebration of International Nurses Day. And from May 18–23, CapacityPlus will take part in the International Council of Nurses 25th Quadrennial Congress. This event will highlight how nurses are key to ensuring access to quality health care for all, and provide a global platform for sharing nursing knowledge.

We need more nurses!

 

CapacityPlus’s Heather Ross will participate in the ICN Congress and give two presentations on behalf of her colleagues:

  • Designing Evidence-Based Incentives for Recruitment and Retention of Nurses. Through application of its Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit, CapacityPlus assisted the ministries of health in Uganda and Lao PDR to conduct a rapid discrete choice experiment (DCE) to assess health workers’ motivational preferences and select the most cost-effective incentive strategies to increase attraction and retention of nurses and other cadres in rural areas. The DCE is a rigorous research method to identify the trade-offs health workers are willing to make between specific job characteristics as well as the probability of accepting a job post. Using the iHRIS Retain retention intervention costing software, various incentive packages were costed to yield low, moderate, and high investment options to determine the financial feasibility for retention strategy implementation. The findings suggest a number of effective strategies to attract and retain nurses and other cadres.
  • Identifying Opportunities for Investing in the Scale-Up of Nursing and Midwifery Education and Training in Low-Resource Settings. As part of the US Government’s Nursing Education Partnership Initiative (NEPI), CapacityPlus led assessments of nursing and midwifery education and training capacity at multiple nursing and midwifery schools in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia. The assessments addressed nine areas that are critical to education, namely educators, students, financial management, infrastructure, materials, curriculum, clinical practice, quality assurance, and partnership and exchange. The assessments served to identify areas where targeted investments could have the greatest impact on increasing the quantity and/or quality of nursing and midwifery graduates.

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Photo by Trevor Snapp, courtesy of IntraHealth International. (Nurse with patient in Kenya)