An innovative Faculty of Health collaboration with Ghana is helping to enhance nursing education and, ultimately, the delivery of health care in the West African country.
“Building a strong, resilient health system in Ghana,” a faculty webinar held on April 28, profiled the activities to date of Advancing Scholarship and Capacity for Emerging Nursing Doctorates, or ASCEND, a research and teaching collaboration between Health’s School of Nursing, and the School of Nursing and Midwifery at the University for Health and Allied Sciences (UHAS) in Ghana. The program involves admitting two qualified master’s-prepared nursing faculty from UHAS into York’s PhD Nursing program each year for three years, starting last fall.
More broadly, ASCEND will help bolster the clinical expertise and leadership skills of nurses in Ghana, a country where nurses comprise 90% of the health workforce, but most don’t have a nursing degree, which can affect the quality of care they provide. With the Ghanaian government having recently mandated that public university faculty members hold PhDs, ASCEND will ultimately help enhance the training of the more than 330 nurses and midwives who graduate from UHAS each year, enabling them to better meet local health care needs.
Hosted by Julie Hard, International Relations Manager in the Faculty of Health, the webinar featured the perspective of five stakeholder panelists. Professor Ernestina Donkor, Acting Dean of UHAS’ School of Nursing and Midwifery, said that expanding the capacity, quality and scope of nursing training and research in Ghana will produce several long-term benefits for the country and its neighbours. These will include a better-trained health workforce, more research collaborations and post-graduate nursing programs, and strengthening the nursing profession overall.
Also on the panel was Japiong Milipaak, one of the first two ASCEND PhD nursing candidates. Milipaak studies the health-care barriers and facilitators facing people with kidney disease in Ghana. For his doctoral research, he will examine these patients’ experiences with Ghana’s health system; the nursing knowledge needed to provide hemodialysis; and policy options to support those who cannot afford this treatment.
“The theoretical knowledge and practical skills will help me in the training of the next generation of nurses in Ghana using evidence-based practice,” Milipaak said. “I am poised to make a contribution to knowledge in a way that will benefit people in Africa and the world at large.”
Panelist Irene Torshie Attachie, a UHAS lecturer and the other current ASCEND PhD nursing candidate, praised the initiative as a gift to her and her family, considering the high cost of obtaining a PhD degree. Robert Kaba Alhassan, a senior research fellow and Acting Dean of International Programs at UHAS, highlighted the need to close the gap in evidence-based nursing. Jacqueline Choiniere, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director for York’s School of Nursing, noted how York Nursing faculty are learning more about the similarities and differences between the health systems of Ghana and Canada.
Realizing the important goals of ASCEND comes at a high cost, said Faculty of Health Dean Paul McDonald, noting that even with tens of thousands of dollars in annual investment from program partners, current resources prevent expansion of the program to admit more candidates, and to extend it to other health professions.
“The reality is that initiatives like ASCEND require resources,” McDonald said. “We need champions to help us advance and expand the mission of the program, which is an emergent and important example of advancing health and health care through international collaboration.”
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