PAIRS Training for Health Care Providers

June 2, 2023

A team of MPH students, KC LaMattina, Cindy Hanson, Isabelle Silber, and Amal Abubakar, is working  with Nurture Africa, an NGO partnering with  Children’s Health Ireland (CHI), to improve healthcare workers’ resuscitation skills. 

Nurture Africa’s resuscitation training program is called Pediatric Assessment of Illness, Recognition, and Stabilization (PAIRS). PAIRS training aims to improve the quality of care for pediatric patients and develop sustainable resuscitation capability.  It will be piloted in the Nansana Municipality with the goal of expanding it across Uganda. 

The team worked with Nurture Africa to develop a proposal for a program that would implement PAIRS training in Nansana with the sustainability potential of scaling up across the larger Wakiso District. With the support of the Nurture Africa team, the BUSPH team developed a five year proposal with four majors objectives: 1) Provide PAIRS training to healthcare workers and Training of Trainers (ToT) to develop a local faculty of PAIRS trainers; 2) Equip all 14 health centers with resuscitation kits; 3) Obtain accreditation of PAIRS training by Ministry of Health; and 4) Community outreach facilitated by local faculty around health center capacity and resuscitation. 

Addressing these four pathways within the program will increase the capacity of the health centers and health providers to improve neonatal resuscitation. 

The sustainability of this program lies in the use of local faculty. With local faculty as the main providers of PAIRS training and  community outreach regarding resuscitation. Ultimately, Nurture Africa would like to see PAIRS become a government accredited program.