Experience of a Quality Improvement Training facilitator in Oyo state, Nigeria, June 2022

The beauty of being a facilitator is you are motivated to read up, to understand better. Since you would be teaching others and they must get it clear, so you must get it very clear first. So, it is a stimulus for you to read more, to know more and gain more. Thus, improving my own knowledge on what I taught the students. One also learns from the participants as they ask questions, it gives better insights to the course. Again, you feel great when the participants are able to recall what they learnt.in addition, you see participants learning more, having more skills, it makes one feel very useful. Being a facilitator is a great leverage and opportunity and I’d love to do it again and again.

Generally, what I have learnt from the participants of the QI training is the gap and challenges they face daily in their place of work. Some didn’t understand importance of audit, that there are standards and best practices. I saw how many of them use their discretion for practice, doing what they think is best. But now, they have been introduced to the standards, and they could see the gap in how they provide services and what they can actually do, to bring quality improvement in services they provide to pregnant women and their babies. To me, it has opened my eyes to see areas where we can plan more to be positively productive. In addition, I saw that many of them are teachable and can acquire more skills which is an eye opener for the government to leverage and invest in such.

One thing I like about this training is that it is coming at the time when Nigeria needs it the most. A training like this which builds the capacity and knowledge for health care workers is very great because they know what to do and have what they need, quality of service will definitely improve and outcome of service will be better, thus, improving the health care indices. If the health care workers know what to do, they will get better especially when they cascade this training to other colleagues in their facilities. It will imply that the quality improvement will happen and pregnant woman and their babies will have better services, improving the health indices.