SIF volunteers complete emergency nursing course in Indonesia

Malang, Indonesia, 14 October 2009…Volunteers from the Singapore International Foundation (SIF) worked with nurses over two years to develop and conduct an emergency nursing training programme to benefit emergency nurses and thousands of patients in Indonesia.
The training programme will be the first ever accredited emergency nursing course offered in Indonesia and is developed as part of the SIF Singapore Volunteers Overseas (SVO) Specialist Team (Emergency Nursing Education) Project in Malang, Indonesia.
The SIF has partnered the University of Brawijaya, Health Polytechnic of Malang and Saiful Anwar General Hospital since 2007 for this training-of-trainers project.
Emergency medical treatment is much needed in Indonesia. For example, the Saiful Anwar General Hospital in Malang attends to an average of 150 to 200 emergency cases per day. Malang is located in East Java, Indonesia’s second most populous province.
A high number of these emergency cases include traffic and industrial accidents that occur along the main highway from Malang to Surabaya. As a result, head injuries, extreme fractures, abdomen and chest traumas are common. Experience with disasters such as mudflows, earthquakes and tsunamis have also placed its emergency medical staff on high alert, and nurses and doctors from Malang have often rendered humanitarian relief aid in other parts of the country.
To help meet the need for emergency medical care, SIF specialist volunteers from Singapore General Hospital (SGH) and Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP) worked with SIF’s Indonesian partners over a period of more than two years to upgrade the skills, knowledge and training capabilities of 30 medical workers from the three partner institutions.
These trainees will then go on to train other emergency nurses in East Java, including 70 emergency nurses at Saiful Anwar General Hospital. The resulting skills enhancement is expected to benefit some 73,000 emergency patients that the hospital sees each year.
SIF volunteer Josephine Teo, who is Advance Practice Nurse Intern (Emergency Care) in SGH and team leader of the project, explains that many of the Indonesian trainees are nurses with years of experience. “Most of them have worked in hospitals for many years. So coming back to the classroom was something very new to them,” she says. “When we first conducted the training two years ago, we needed translators to help out. Subsequently, on each return, we would notice that everyone had made a concerted effort to learn conversational English, so that they can be more interactive in the training. Throughout the two years, their desire to improve their skills has never waned.”
A group of six Indonesian nurses also visited Singapore from March to April 2007, where they were attached to SGH and NYP to learn the more about the state of art of emergency nursing from their Singapore counterparts. The curriculum will be launched in Malang by Brawijaya University upon its accreditation by the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Nursing Association of Indonesia by the end of this year.
SIF Director for International Volunteerism and Community Partnerships Aaron Ng says, “Having one of the more technologically-advanced emergency nursing facilities in South East Asia, Singapore is happy to share its experience to help launch a new certification in this discipline in Indonesia. Although our volunteers are veterans in the field, they have found the exercise most educational as they learn many things from their Indonesian counterparts. It is such mutual learning and sharing that has enriched both parties and helped build a better world of friends and of sustainable development.”
The two-year project will officially conclude in a closing ceremony in Malang today.