Dr Paul O'Toole and Dr Joe Geraghty from RLUH made a third endoscopy training visit to Malawi in September / October 2010, as part of our British Council-funded International Health Link. They gave hands-on training to 4 new endoscopists, and also enhanced the skills of 2 more who have now become independent endoscopists as a result of our previous visits. As well as training during routine endoscopy lists, they were able to make use of the new training dummy we have shippped out to Malawi.
Our Health Link has already been able to provide an online computer and printer. Dr O'Toole was able to equip the Malawi unit with specially-written reporting software, training assessment tools and lesion recognition software, which will be invaluable for training and audit.
We are delighted that our first Malawian endoscopist has now been trained as a Trainer; Anstead Kankwatira, who began his endoscopy training during our first visit to Malawi, is now an independent endoscopist and visited our Liverpool unit in October 2010 for a Training-the-Trainer course in Gastroscopy. This is a major step towards the Malawi endoscopy unit becoming more sustainable and self-sufficient for training.
More information about this visit is available
here.
In March 2011 we were delighted to hear that we were awarded further grant funding from the British Council and from the British Society of Gastroenterology to extend our training programme to help other neighbouring district hospitals in Malawi to improve their endoscopy, and to gradually become more self-sufficient.I
In
April 2010 a Malawian endoscopy nurse, Sister Rose Malamba, visited the Royal Liverpool University Hospital for training and to develop locally relevant training and protocol documents. You can read her report here.
