Skills Health Academy in Tripura

Background

The Health Skills Academy (HSA) commenced its operations in August 2015 with the aim of providing qualitatively trained and employable manpower to the health care industry. Two more such HSAs are operational in Trivandrum, Kerala (With HLL) and Guwahati (with Nemcare).

Intervention

A visible difference has been made with support from Government of Tripura through community health activities by providing primary health care. Vision Technician Assistants are trained by IL&FS in Tripura.

Curriculum design and course details

• The courses in the academy have been designed at three levels - basics, middle level for dialysis technician, radiography, emergency medical technician and the third for nurses and doctors like Ultrasound, NICU care, OT nursing, Critical Care nursing, emergency nursing and medicine course.
• Curriculum design and modular course details are well developed by the experts from medical and nursing field.
• A systematic evaluation i.e. formative and summative evaluation for theory and practical is conducted for all the 3 category of health professionals.
• A third party evaluation is also done for doctors, nurses and GDAS. Pre test-Post test design is used for programme evaluation. A comprehensive feedback from each group has helped in strengthening the programme further.

The pedagogical approaches

The pedagogical approaches used during the training were Didactic Teaching (Lecture, Discussion-Small/Large Group, Participatory Learning, Demonstration, Simulation, Role Pay, Presentation, Seminar, Clinical Field and Observation Recording), Practical Lab (Procedure Demo, Return Demo, Practicing of skills), Simulation with Case scenarios (using High-Fidelity, Mid-Fidelity and Low- Fidelity Simulators), and Clinical experience in Hospitals (On the Job Training (OJT) at Fortis, CMRI, Birla Heart Institute and Medical Multi Specialty Hospital and Max Hospital, Delhi)

Follow up study

• To assess the impact of the programme, a follow up study was done including doctors, nurses and GDAS trained at HSA using 4 points Likert's Scale with remarks column. The questionnaire also includes 4-5 open ended questions.
• The findings of the study was congruent to the programme evaluation taken from the participants indicating that there was significant gain in knowledge, skills and attitude of all 3 categories of health professionals.
• The Department of Health, Government of Tripura has asked the ISHA to help them in capacity building by conducting training of trainer programmes for doctors in all the specialties, nurses in all the specialties and Ward management skills.

Key takeaways

• Training should be a continuous process for doctors, nurses and allied health professional.
• The Health Skills Academy (HSA) in Tripura can be replicated in many states as the importance of providing qualitatively trained and employable manpower to the Health Care Industry cannot be overlooked.

source : Skilling for employability - Best Practices