Sharing Excellence: A Personal Approach Trains Hundreds of Nurses

Jo Leslie and Lisa Scotti have worked for many years with the Hopkins HIV/AIDS Clinical Service. And recently, through the Center for Clinical Global Health Education, they have learned how their experience caring for AIDS patients in Baltimore can benefit patients far from home.

First, they taught 22 nurses the specifics of HIV prevention and management in Pune, India, a city of 4.7 million where nearly 2 percent of the population is HIV-infected.  Six months after finishing their Hopkins training, the Indian nurses split into four teams, and each taught another group of 20 nurses the techniques they’d learned.

This “train-the-trainer” model has expanded the program’s impact to ensure that all 600 nurses at Pune’s Sassoon General Hospital become skilled in dealing with HIV patients. Nisha Despande, principal of the hospital’s nursing college, explains what happens this way: “Those who’d been taught told all their friends about the course, and now everyone wants it. They ask me, When will our turn come?”

But just as important, attitudes have changed at Sassoon. Whereas HIV patients used to be kept in a corner, that discrimination has nearly disappeared, as has the fear the Indian nurses once felt about working with the patients. But what most impressed Lisa Scotti was the way the Indian nurses who attended the first round have made the training their own. “It was wonderful to return and see them using it so effectively,” she says.

Bob Bollinger, who directs the Center that sent the Hopkins nurses to Pune, says that in the long time he’s worked in India, “I’ve seen few programs with such an immediate, measurable impact on patient care.” It’s a model, he says, that he hopes shortly to expand to some 5,000 nurses throughout the state of Maharashtra.

To view the course materials for the nurses training, click here.