Improving Nursing & Midwifery Care in Liberia 2025

FOL-LHT 2025 Second Quarterly Reports

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

Introduction

The Friends of Liberia-Liberia Health Team (FOL-LHT) is a team of local healthcare professionals (nurse-educators) with the general objective of improving nursing/midwifery education and clinical competencies in Liberia through annual continuing professional development (CPD) workshop in Liberia’s central city of Gbarnga. In this quarterly report our focus is on the multiplier effects of the 2025 CPD workshops which we conducted for nursing/midwifery faculty and clinicians across Liberia. In this narrative, we summarized rollout reports from five healthcare institutions ( two nursing/midwifery training institutions and three hospitals).

Finding

            Data we have gathered from these five healthcare institutions indicate a multiplier effect of 129 participants(two training schools=50 participants and 79 participants in various hospitals). Institutions involved included: The Tubman National Institute of Medical, Ganta United Methodist Hospital, Foya Hospital, Curran Lutheran Hospital, and Christian Community College. Topics these trained facilitators conducted in their respective facilities included, but not limited to:

1. Developing teaching-learning objectives
2. Clinical audit and quality improvement
3. Legal aspects of Documentation
4. Building Effective Management Skills in the Healthcare System.
5. How to Sign up to ChatGPT
6. Clinical Evaluation
7. Management of Preeclampsia/Eclampsia
8. Nursing Documentations
9. Test Items analysis

Challenges

The primary challenge has been timely reporting by our trainers. A secondary challenge is the delay or lack of funding by trainers’ institutions to facilitate these workshops.

Mitigating the Challenges

One way to mitigate these challenges is to constantly remind trainers and their institutions’ administrations about the need for timely rollout and reporting. This will include when quarterly reports are scheduled for onward submission to FOL/GlobalGiving. To ensure that institutions provide supports to our trainers to rollout the CPD workshop resources in their respective institutions, we will place a strong emphasis on timely rollout and reporting as a perquisite for future invitations to attend our CPD workshops.

Conclusion

Initial reports from the five healthcare institutions indicate a multiplier effect of 129 healthcare professionals, mostly in rural Liberia, who have benefited from our 2025 CPD workshops resources. We strongly believe that this number will increase in subsequent quarterly reports with a cumulative percent of over 80%. The net impact of our sponsored CPD workshops will be more trained healthcare professionals thus improving the healthcare delivery system in Liberia. Our CPD workshops, recognized by the Liberian Board for Nursing and Midwifery, will help participants increase their CPD credits, which are requirements for renewal of licenses.  

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

Introduction: 

Research shows that effective continuing professional development (CPD) helps improve the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of teaching faculty and clinicians thus positively impacting the learning outcomes and care of patients, respectively.

The main idea behind CPD in the context of health education and clinical practices is to support and maintain healthcare professionals’ competencies at the level sufficient enough so that they can provide quality and evidence-informed services. With the increasing roles for nurses, midwives, and other healthcare providers, nurses and midwives need to be trained to ensure that they are competent service providers (Micalle and Kayyal, 2019).

The main purpose of our initiative has been to enable nursing/midwifery faculty and practicing nurses and midwives to stay competitive, confident, and competent in performing their professional duties in the healthcare delivery system.

Challenges

            We conducted a needs assessment survey among accredited Liberian nursing/midwifery schools which showed the challenges faced by nursing/midwifery faculty in the areas of Setting Well Formatted Objectives for Students’ Learning Outcome, Evaluating Educational Programs, Familiarity with International Nursing/Midwifery Organizations. We also conducted a parallel online study followed by a needs assessment among nurses/midwives working in public and private hospitals/health centers across Liberia. An analysis of the data we collected from these needs assessment surveys and a review of the literature showed that postpartum hemorrhage, eclampsia and birth asphyxia are among the top leading causes of maternal-infants’ mortalities and morbidities in Liberia

Solution    

           With support from Friends of Liberia-US (FOL-US) and GlobalGiving through FOL-US, we conducted a three-day workshop for nursing/midwifery faculty and a three-day workshop for practicing nurses/midwives. We strongly believe that if nursing/midwifery faculty and practicing nurses/midwives are provided additional evidence-informed and context relevant CPD training, it will help in mitigating the identified current challenges in their respective discipline. On this basis we conducted the 2025 workshop using our usual format as follows:

Faculty CPD: January 6 &7, 2025

Joint Session (Faculty and clinicians): January 8, 2025

Practicing nurses/midwives CPD: January 9 & 10, 2025

            Twenty-two nursing/midwifery faculty and twenty-four practicing nurses/midwives from across Liberia attended their respective workshops. We invited two expert trainers from the Liberia Midwifery Association who presented on postpartum hemorrhage, eclampsia, and birth asphyxia. This year’s workshop was the first time we administered pre and post tests online to measure the level of participants' achievement and issued certificates of achievement. 

Long-Term Impact

            Our envisaged long-term impact is tailored with the topics we presented based on the analysis and inferences we gathered from the results of our needs assessment. Evidence shows that CPD promotes employee’s satisfaction and retention, patient’s satisfaction, and reduces patient’s stay in the hospital. It also improves students learning outcomes.

Specifically, the nursing/midwifery faculty will be competent in writing well formatted learning objectives. They will also be knowledgeable and competent in evaluating their own institutional programs. Additionally, practicing nurses/midwives will be effective in handling postpartum hemorrhage, eclampsia, and birth aphasias which are among the causes of maternal-infants’ morbidities and mortalities in Liberia. These topics were adequately addressed by midwifery experts during our 2025 workshop. The trigger down impact will be helping government in its efforts to reduce maternal-infants’ morbidities and mortalities in Liberia.