Nursingmatters March 2017 • Volume 28, Number 3
www.nursingmattersonline.com
INSIDE: Homeopathic medicine
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Transforming practice
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Scholarship winners
ELECTRONIC SERVICE REQUESTED
PAID
MADISON WI PERMIT NO. 1723
PRST STD US POSTAGE
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HOPE brought to nations Tamar Myers
A storage locker, about 6,000 square feet, is filled with a tumble of medical supplies. Among them are a portable x-ray, an ultrasound machine, rows of incubators, exam tables and much more. It’s all been collected through donations, including from hospitals and nursing homes. Karen Klemp, founder and president of the Sun Prairie nonprofit Hope 2 Others, is waiting to collect enough funds to send the equipment to where supplies like those aren’t Karen Klemp accessible. The organization is continuing its mission of improving lives in developing countries, through gestures both big – shipping containers full of equipment – and small – distributing warm clothes to infants in need. This past summer Karen Klemp, RN, BSN, MA, who is a neonatal nurse at UnityPoint Health-Meriter Hospital in Madison, co-led a mission with her husband, Rick, and her friend and colleague Nancy Comello, Nancy RN, CNM, MS. The Hope Comello 2 Others mission team, which included 11 trained volunteers, traveled to Guatemala. There they trained 95 midwives in four regions of the country, using the “Helping Mothers Survive” and “Helping Babies Breathe” programs. They distributed 100 birthing kits to the midwives. The kits included instructional books, stethoscopes, suction devices, bars of soap, newborn-baby hats and resuscitation bag-masks. The Guatemala midwife project was created as Comello’s Doctor of Nursing Practice project. Comello has been an obstetrics and gynecology professor at Edgewood Nursing College for several years as well as working at Meriter. She and Klemp have traveled for more than a decade together, leading teams to help train and teach lifesaving skills to midwives, birth attendants, nurses, doctors, educators, and firefighters or emergency medical technicians in developing countries.
Students in Tanzania learn to help babies breathe.
Simple simulation training devices such as the Mama Natalie – uterus and baby – are used for hands-on training.
Simple simulation training devices such as the Mama Natalie – uterus and baby – and NeoNatalie – infant manikins and resuscitation equipment – are used for hands-on training. Students are able to easily learn and remember lifesaving skills. The devices are far easier to travel with and much more cost-effective compared to simulation labs. The outcomes are shown to have improved skilled care for mothers and babies; lives are being saved. The cost of the two training devices, complete with booklets and educational flipcharts for teaching, is about $1,000 for each set. The Hope 2 Others team was able to give six training sets to nine Guatemalan
providers who were trained as master trainers in four areas of Guatemala. The master-trainer program makes the project sustainable because those trainers will continue teaching and training others in the curriculum. “(It’s a) trainers-train-others teaching model,” Klemp said. The project was made possible through donations from many people, organizations and businesses. MDF Instruments donated 100 infant stethoscopes, NeilMed Pharmaceuticals donated 100 infant suction devices, and Ad Press of Middleton donated printing for Spanish workbooks and flipcharts. “It was such a joy to be able to give this life-saving gift of the simulation training tools and educational materials, (as well as) birthing kits and Hats 4 Hope kits to the people who we were teaching, for the first time in our many years of mission work,” Klemp said. As well as resuscitating infants in trouble, Klemp said they taught about caring for the mothers – especially for postpartum hemorrhage, which is the leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide. Other
See HOPE, Page 3