By Hassan Zaggi
Forty years after its establishment, the College of Nursing and Midwifery, Maiduguri, has finally secured full accreditation from the Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria.
This was made possible with the recent donation of modern equipment and tools by the World Health Organisation (WHO) with funding support from the European Union (EU).
Items donated by the WHO included laboratory equipment, classroom furniture, books, practical teaching tools, hospital beds and computers.
The provision of training equipment and facilities for improved healthcare teaching and learning in the College will impact on the healthcare delivery system of the northeast both now and in the long term.
The Provost of the College, Rukaiya Shettima, who was a student of the school, said that although the school was established in 1971 by the defunct government of northern Nigeria, she was offered admission to study nursing in the school in 1981.
According to her: “As a student nurse in the 1980s, I still recall how we struggled to memorize procedures, role-play steps and imagine practical approaches for activities we hadn’t adequate equipment for practicals. Despite the challenges, studying nursing in this school back in the 1980s was fun and a privilege, yet more arduous.
“The school hadn’t full accreditation from Nigerian Nursing Council and admitted just a few students due to inadequate facilities and teaching staff.
“Although we did well for many years in national and international examinations, it took uncommon dedication and commitment to success.”
Hajiya Rukaiya recalled that the quality of training and learning started declining over the years due to obsolete equipment, outdated facilities and exodus of many skilled teachers who left for safety or for greener pastures especially in the last decade associated with the insurgency in north-east Nigeria.
“It was not until 2016 that the government of Borno state upgraded the school to a College of Nursing and Midwifery.
“As a College of Nursing and Midwifery, the school still operated with partial accreditation until WHO with funding support from the EU supported the College with requisite laboratory equipment and reagents, information technology tools including computers, modern nursing textbooks and classroom facilities which enabled full accreditation in 2020 after forty years from inception.
“With the full accreditation today, teaching and learning at the College have improved tremendously. In fact, in our last examination, 98% of our students scored 95% in nursing exams.
“Presently, the College admits as much as three times the number of students admitted hitherto in Basic Nursing programmes, Basic Midwifery, Community Nursing and Community Midwifery.
“Also, the College curriculum has been expanded to include community midwife and community nursing among others.
“The college can now award a Higher National Diploma in Nursing and Midwifery. Many thanks to WHO supported by the European Union,” she said.
On his part, the Emergency Manager, WHO Health Emergency Programmes for north-east, Dr. Collins Owili, said that prior to the insurgency, northeastern Nigeria had one of the lowest health development indicators in Nigeria.
He noted that as the crisis increased, “more than two-thirds of health facilities became completely or partially destroyed with a dramatic drop in childhood vaccination rates, leaving children at greater risk of preventable life-threatening diseases such as polio, malaria, meningitis and measles.”
