Usually we are let down by our own thoughts and feelings along with how the environment perceives us. If we want to be change makers, building our self-confidence will help improve those thoughts and feelings.

Here we go!  My own experience during the first quarter of my Global Health Corps fellowship year.

Professionally, I am a nurse. The environment perceives a nurse’s role as only providing bedside care; therefore, many nurses view themselves in this light. When faced with a situation where a nurse has to do something apart from providing bedside care, poor self-confidence takes over. They feel they were only meant to provide bedside care and are unable to do anything else.

As a Health Systems Strengthening Fellow, my job description includes coordinating and providing training to health care providers on maternal child health (MCH) topics, follow-up hospital visits focused on new technology (CPAP), data collection, and weekly calls to instructors at the hospital.

In order to fulfill my role of conducting training to health care providers, including doctors, I had to overcome the belief that nurses are not in a position to train doctors. I also had to fight the environmental bias that doctors may challenge nurses. But all I had to do was build self- confidence.

To run training successfully:

I had everything I needed for training ready. People usually lose confidence or others lose confidence in you when you are missing materials and puzzling around during the training session. Prepare with your PowerPoint, which enhances your power while speaking and gives you something to point to. (I learned this from Noerine Kaleeba, Founder of Ugandan HIV/AIDS organization TASO, during GHC’s training insitute at Yale).

I did not compare myself to the doctors, but instead I focused on what I wanted to contribute to bring about change.

Tell you what! The doctors were impressed and learned a lot from the training and from my  follow-up. They are applying the new technology with patients and encouraging the rest of their teams to use it. The outcome was awesome. So nurses, have the courage, you can do it. Be nurse educators, advocates, practitioners… along with providing bedside care.

 

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