Thursday, September 25, 2008

SA and Kenyan cohorts grow further


In the past two weeks or so almost 200 nursing students have been added to the CREHS Cohorts in South Africa and Kenya. Most recently, on 23 September, 73 very enthusiastic (picture above) students from Excelsius Nursing College in Klerksdorp in the North West Province of South Africa decided to participate in the research. This brings the total number of cohort members in South Africa to 326.

On the same day, the researchers in Kenya collected data from 31 distance learners from the Murang'a Medical Training College. On the 16th of September, 48 pre-service learners from the same college joined the cohort and a few days before that 29 distance learners from the Meru Medical Training College took part in the baseline data collection activities. Below is a picture of some of the participants from Meru.


The next stop for the South African study is Potchefstroom, where we hope to persuade students from North West University to participate in the research. In Kenya, the researchers hope to return to Meru Medical Training College in mid-October for further baseline data collection, this time with pre-service learners.

Watch this space!!


Thursday, September 4, 2008

The Cohort Study just started in Kenya

The official beginning of the cohort study in the third country, Kenya took place yesterday. 55 final year nursing students from the Nairobi Medical Training College (MTC) actively took part in baseline data collection activities during several hours.


Refreshments were ready to help the students through all the data collection tools, and in the end, everybody seemed quite happy to have participated !


Those 55 students from Nairobi MTC are the first members of the Kenyan cohort, but they should soon be joined by others.



Early next week, more data collection at the Nairobi MTC will take place to include distance learning students. Soon after, other MTCs outside of Nairobi will also be visited, and more Kenyan nursing students will join their South African and Thai colleagues as CREHS cohort members!