Nurse aide supervisor, Ei San Myint (29 years old), has been working at Mae Tao Clinic for 5 years as a health worker. She attended the Nurse Aide training for 9 months in 2016. To be eligible for the training, health workers should complete the Community Health Worker training and gain some experience on basic medical knowledge and treatments. The nurse aide training consists of theoretical and practical sessions, including internships at Mae Tao Clinic and a Thai hospital. As she still had responsibilities being a Community Health Worker, Ei San Myint followed the theory course of the nurse aide training on a part-time basis. After the theory, she was given a chance to participate in the 5-week practical training at a Thai government hospital in Tha Son Yang. Ei San Myint says:
“Through the training, I obtained a wide range of knowledge and skills. I have gained in-depth knowledge about patient care and treatment, management of medical appliances, standard precautions, disease management and side effects, patient charts management and the importance of the Infection Prevention Unit and its management. Among all, most importantly, I’ve learned the roles and responsibilities of a nurse aide in my department, Reproductive Health Inpatient Department,”
She seemed very happy and satisfied with that she participated in the training. Before the training, it was not clear for her to distinguish the roles and responsibilities between medic and nurse aide. The training gave her a better idea of how to collaborate with medics to improve service delivery to patients. Nonetheless, it was challenging in the beginning. For instance, although sometimes she sees and thinks the customary patient care services provided by medics are somewhat different from what she learned from the Thai hospital, she could not correct them as she did not want to go beyond her authority. Throughout numbers of workshops on standard patient care guidelines that medics required to attend, Ei San Myint feels that task distribution between medic and nurse aide has become clearer, resulting in more adequate care to the patients at MTC. Another challenge was that at the Thai hospital, she learned how to use medical appliances for better patient care but at MTC some of this equipment is not available. Thus she had to adapt herself to the low-resource settings and needed to improvise when necessary.
“over the past years, many things have improved. One of them I want to highlight is the rotation system. If we work in only one department, we can miss some important issues and information from other departments. So now we are given the chance to work in different departments by rotation which helps us to catch up with the latest updates on diseases and different type of patient care, etc.,”
Ei San Myint shared with us her thoughts on the care at MTC. And she added that
“We still have many challenges and need numerous medical supplies at MTC to enhance the quality of care, but I am greatly appreciative of donors’ support that enabled Mae Tao Clinic to provide nurse aide training. Thanks to the support, more health workers are given a great opportunity to have hands-on experience at the Thai hospital and after the completion of this unique internship, nurses come back to the clinic, continuing to provide better services. This leads to the improved service that our patients benefit from.”
Through the 2019 program, 24 health workers successfully completed the training. Some of them will start to work under Ei San Myint’s supervision. Additionally, 2019 showed continued integration of nursing roles and responsibilities in MTC’s in-patient departments.
Mae Tao Clinic would like to thank APHEDA and the Embassy of Luxembourg in Bangkok for its support for the Nursing Aide Training.
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