Improving Nursing & Midwifery Care in Liberia 2025

Improving Nursing and Midwifery Education and Practices in Liberia through Professional Development Workshop

Introduction

     The main idea behind continuing professional development (CPD) in the context of health education and clinical practices is to support and maintain healthcare professionals’ competencies at the level sufficient to enable them to provide quality and evidence-informed services. With the increasing complexities roles for nurses, midwives, and other healthcare providers, nurses and midwives need to be trained to ensure that they are competent service providers (Micalle & Kayyal, 2019). As we prepare for the 2025 CPD, we feel it compelling to list the specific activities that we will do in order to fulfill the results of the needs assessment.  

Challenges

     In low-income countries, like Liberia, conducting continuing faculty development workshop has a lot of obstacles. Prominent among these are lack of resources, lack of time, and limited access. In Liberia, for example, the majority of nursing and midwifery training institutions have limited resources to conduct CPD workshops regularly. Maternal-infant mortality issues are among the major health challenges in the country.

Solution         

     Over the past five years, a team of Liberia Healthcare Professionals (Friends of Liberia-Liberia Health Team) with supports from Friends of Liberia-US, GlobalGiving, and Global Health Ministries has continued to conduct annual CPD workshops for nursing/midwifery faculty and practicing nurses and midwives. Currently, we are conducting needs assessment to guide us in developing a curriculum that is responsive, evidence-informed, and content relevant for our 2025 faculty and clinicians’ workshops. The 2025 CPD in addition to addressing results from the needs assessment will take into account measures to help government in mitigating the high maternal-infant mortalities in the country. Our strategy in this regard will be to have a joint session that will include faculty and practicing nursing/midwives.

Long term Impact

     Like previous workshops, participants will be provided workshop learning resources and encouraged to share these resources with their colleagues in their respective institutions through workshops.  Continuing Professional Development can enhance, maintain, and up-date the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of nursing/midwifery faculty and practicing nurses and midwives. In Liberia, where resources are very limited and nursing/midwifery schools and hospitals do not conduct regular CPD training. Our yearly in-service workshops, which have impacted over 100 nursing/midwifery faculty and over 90 practicing nurses/midwives since 2020, will augment the Liberian Government’s efforts in improving the healthcare delivery system of the country.

Your donations will help us to carry on and improve offering these important workshops. Thank you for your continued support!