Midwives, community health nurses and hospital nurses
NAC has trained more than 15 percent of all midwives and community health nurses in Afghanistan. In our efforts to ensure better access to health services in rural Afghanistan, we focus on educating health professionals from rural and hard-to-reach, and often highly conservative communities, suffering from acute health care shortages.
The many hundreds of midwives and health nurses we have trained over the past twenty years, help to reduce maternal and child mortality in Afghanistan. In addition to improve public health, education helps to create jobs for women and to strengthen the role of women, both in their families and in their home communities.
Jordmor-, helsesøster- og sykepleierskolene Afghanistankomiteen har ansvaret for er blant de beste i landet. Vi jobber likevel kontinuerlig med å bedre kvaliteten ved de tre høyskolene gjennom kompetanseheving hos lærerne, økt fokus på yrkesrelevant praksis i studietida, kompetansebygging og tilgang til ny kunnskap og nytt utstyr.
NAC’s midwifery and community health nursing schools are consistently evaluated as being among the best in the country. Nevertheless, we are continuously working to improve the quality of the three colleges we support, through: building the confidence and competence of teachers, an increased focus on occupationally relevant practices during the study period, and providing access to new knowledge and new equipment.
In all the schools we support, we also work to develop students’ and faculty members’ ICT and language skills, beyond what is required in the curriculum. We offer important elective courses, such as physical education, literature, art and culture. Entrepreneurship is also a compulsory subject in NAC supported health education programs, as many of those who graduate will have to create their own jobs, because there are only limited number of existing healthcare jobs available in the system, and most of these are not in the rural areas where our students come from.
In collaboration with the Nansen Center for Peace and Dialogue in Lillehammer, we also offer training in dialogue and peaceful conflict transformation. This is to help our health care professionals, who often have to negotiate with conflicting parties about access to patients, or for access to female patients who are hindered by their families from visiting health institutions due to cultural barriers.