Bluebell school assessment 2024

Bluebell classroom November 2024

Bluebell School is operated by Oasis for Posterity in Balagram, a small town in Nilphamari district. It provides 60 children with a no-fees education from pre-school to grade five (the terminal primary grade in most of South Asia). The school serves an adjacent social housing village for landless families, with additional students attending from the nearby town.

Donor contributions helped us buy a classroom TV for on-line teaching programs

Several times, we have assessed children's learning in the two key cognitive skills, reading and arithmetic. How to do it? Unfortunately, in both India and Bangladesh, official learning outcomes reported for government schools are either impossible to interpret or seriously biased. Two decades ago, Pratham, a large Indian NGO initiated very large – over 600,000 children – biannual surveys conducted in students' homes. To enable comparison – between Bluebell and Balagram students, and between these schools and Indian equivalents – we used a protocol similar to the ASER surveys employed by Pratham in India.

Previously, we have organized in-home surveys only for children living in the social housing project. In 2024, for comparison, we also surveyed public school students in Balagram, the nearby town. Recently, BHP Director John Richards published a summary of the assessment findings (link below) John’s report covers not only the Bluebell assessment results but also the survey protocol, comparisons with results in India using the same survey tool, the impacts of Covid shut-downs and parental literacy, and “learning poverty”.

RICHARDS Bluebell School Assessment 2024.pdf

Download PDF • 752KB

Teaching MPH students at IUBAT

BHP Directors Alex Berland and John Richards are continuing to support development of the Master’s program in Public Health at IUBAT. Alex is teaching “Social and Behavioural Sciences in Public Health” and John is teaching “Biostatistics” via Zoom. There are also frequent email exchanges and online meetings with other program faculty, currently for instance, to plan internships and to review exam questions. On his recent visit to Bangladesh, Alex met with the newest batch of students as well as with the initial batch, who will soon proceed to their internships before graduating next spring.

https://www.onehealthcommission.org/en/resources__services/oh_resources_for_public_health_educators/

We initiated this MPH program for a specific purpose: The shortage of health-care providers [HCP] in Bangladesh is made worse by shortages of HCP with post-graduate training who can educate, supervise and lead others to deliver health services. This situation has created a favourable job market for capable individuals who have both clinical experience and specialized knowledge in areas such as adult education, NGO and hospital management, and research and evaluation. Several MPH programs exist already, but the quality is not always high and the focus is often narrow. The MPH that we have developed at IUBAT is rigorous, using modern educational methods, to prepare graduates who can tackle system-level problems in Bangladesh and internationally.

International students are welcome at IUBAT, a fully accredited English-medium university, with one of the loveliest campuses in Dhaka. We also invite public health professionals to join us as guest faculty or research collaborators by emailing BangladeshHealthProject@pm.me

Nursing students need good practice sites

Many nursing students in Bangladesh practice in a hospital attached to their nursing college. IUBAT College of Nursing has no hospital and its BSN students practice in several excellent institutions - general and specialized hospitals, out-patient clinics and an orphanage - through collaborative arrangements. This is similar to the situation in Canada where nursing colleges and hospitals are generally government-funded but independent. There are several reasons why Canadian hospitals value the presence of nursing students.

1.       There is enhanced prestige in being a “teaching hospital” partly because the presence of nursing faculty as outside experts helps improve standards of care for all staff, for example through bedside teaching that benefits other team members.

2.       Patients benefit from contact with students. Regular staff have many duties and nursing students can spend more time with patients and their families, providing support and education. Many patients are stressed by the hospital environment and benefit from students being available, for instance, to explain instructions about lifestyle changes recommended by the care team.

3.       Hospital staff benefit from working alongside students. Although the students have their own learning duties, they also can help to reduce somewhat the staff workload, by measuring vital signs, helping patients to ambulate and so on. And senior nurses often find that interacting with students helps them stay current with new nursing knowledge.

4.       Students are potential recruits for the hospital. Student practice is an opportunity for head nurses to identify strong candidates for future employment. In addition, student hires have already been oriented to hospital policies so will require less learning time.

IUBAT College of Nursing has also recently invested in major improvements to the nursing skills lab on campus to prepare students for clinical practice. The original equipment was mostly disused items donated by Canadian colleges, transported to Bangladesh by BHP volunteers. The new learning centre includes modern mannikins on which students can safely practice basic and advanced nursing skills such as inserting IVs and tracheostomy care. There are also vital sign monitors for each “patient”. Additional equipment has been purchased for CPR and first aid training. An instructor is available to supervise and support student practice in both regular classes and during students' free time to maximize learning opportunities. Other College of Nursing labs offer practice in microbiology, nutrition and anatomy and physiology.