Sick kids don’t only live in Canada. So SickKids can’t either. If you’ve already heard about the CIDA-funded Global Child Health Program, you know that The Hospital for Sick Children is blazing trails all over the world. But we’re not just leaving behind breadcrumbs of health knowledge, skills and education, we’re leaving the whole loaf and the recipe for the next batch.

On May 30, the Ghana-SickKids Paediatric Nursing Training Program got underway in Ghana. Over the next three years, up to 140 nurses in the west African country will be trained as experts in the care of children and then return to their home-communities to train their peers. The program will help address Ghana’s critical need for 1,500 paediatric nurses by 2015 and support the Ghanaian-led vision of making a sustainable impact on child health systems and leadership in the country.

Dylan Walters, Project Manager for the program, was on the scene for the launch:

“Forty aspiring paediatric nurses, coming from as far away as the northern region of Ghana, eagerly arrived at the School of Nursing, University of Ghana for the inaugural ceremony. Our partners mobilized the students, the press, committee members and distinguished guests to celebrate the realization of this decade-long Ghanaian vision.

“Following the ceremony and photographs, SickKids nurses Pat Malloy and Karen Breen-Reid led the first class. It was clear from the beginning that the first group is keen to learn, motivated to improve children’s health and proud to be future paediatric nurses.”

But SickKids won’t be doing all the teaching. There is much to be learned from our Ghanaian colleagues and from working with countries that have developing health systems. “If each day resembles this one,” said Pat Malloy of her first day in the classroom, “this experience will change not only the nurses in Ghana, but me as well.”

We are confident the Ghana-SickKids Paediatric Nursing Training Program will change SickKids too.