Scholarships

WNF provides scholarships to qualified health care workers in Sierra Leone enabling them to join advanced trainings in surgery, obstetrics, pediatrics or internal medicine. 

Partnership

Under the name of the Wouter Nolet Scholarship Fund (WNSF), WNF grants scholarships to medical students in Sierra leone enabling them to follow an advanced medical trainings in surgery/obstetrics, pediatrics or internal medicine. WNF signed an Memorandum of Understanding with three NGO’s, taking care of the trainings: CapaCare, German Doctors and Partners in Health.

Motives

By stimulating health care workers in Sierra Leone to do a medical advanced training the number of skilled staff in hospitals will increase. This will fill the gap in human resources between medical doctors and nursing staff and will ultimately lead to task sharing between doctors and assistants.

Grant

The monthly grant payments cover the personal costs of the students, including food, clothes, study materials, computer, communication and transport. Housing (accommodation) and school fees are absorbed by the NGO’s that provide the advanced trainings.

The scholarship applies to the entire 3-year period of the advanced training.

Advanced Trainings

The Norwegian NGO CapaCare has originally developed an advanced training program in basic, life-saving  surgery and obstetrics for health care workers in Sierra Leone. The aim of this program was to achieve a task sharing between surgeons and their assistants.

Following up on CapaCare, two other NGO’s  developed similar advanced trainings, each for different medical streams: German Doctors for pediatrics and  Partners in Health for internal medicine.

Bachelor’s Degree

Originally, the advanced trainings lasted for three years. Students -after graduation- got a diploma and were only allowed to operate under the supervision of a medical doctor. That did not seem leading to a succesful task sharing transition.

Therefore, the three NGO’s decided to add a previous 2-year basic medical education to their 3-year advanced trainings. This 2-year pre-education is given by the School of Clinical Science in Makeni (SCSM).

Graduates now become Clinical Officers, receive a bachelor’s degree and are equipped with an operating license of the Medical Identical Council in Sierra Leone. They are employed by the Government and allowed to perform independently the operating tasks for which they have been trained.