Dot Chadwick and Kate Woodhead spent a week at the University Hospital in Kigali, Rwanda delivering education to ten theatre nurses following the installation of the refurbished operating room for children at the hospital. Working with Kids OR ( www.kidsOR.org) who planned, equipped and installed the new paediatric theatre, Friends of African Nursing's role ( www.foan.org.uk) is to ensure that the staff were trained on the new equipment and provide an uplift to their perioperative knowledge base. The ten delegates have never had any input to their specialist area of practice and there were many different topics on our programme. We all worked hard to ensure that the level of information was appropriate and beneficial. We undertook many clinical topics on patient safety, teamwork, infection prevention and the practical application of theory such as the surgical count. We were able to share knowledge on the clinical decontamination of instruments and management of instrument trolleys and the mayo table. They were a great group of students – although we worked them hard. They enjoyed the group work and learning from each other. We made a visit on two occasions to the new paediatric theatre and were able to see it working. We went to main theatres for an extensive tour. We made a visit to the King Faisal Hospital, a local private hospital where we had a look at the operating theatres with one of our delegates and the theatre manager – exchanging ideas as we visited..
Rwanda 2018