The case for surgical skills centres in Sub Saharan Africa: The benefits and the challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the educational and practice utilities of establishing Surgical Skills Centres. The paper also defines significant obstacles to the establishment of such centres in Sub- Saharan Africa. In 1996, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Canada responded to the evolving roles and obligations of medical specialists by implementing a framework of core competencies called the “CanMEDS Roles” which define surgeons as medical experts, communicators, collaborators, managers, health advocates, scholars and professionals. A key competency expected of the medical expert is the demonstration of proficiency in procedural skills2

A Liberal Education: Making the Essentials Practical

The newly revised Essentials of Baccalaureate Education for Professional Nursing Practice states that “a solid base in liberal education provides the cornerstone for the practice and education of nurses.”1(p3) Liberal education is thought to provide professional nurses with some of the necessary skills needed to practice nursing, including critical thinking, effective communication, collaboration with others, appreciation of diversity, and the integration of knowledge from the sciences and humanities to solve problems. However, liberal education is viewed by many faculty as separate from the nursing curriculum: the courses taken prior to the nursing courses. Seeking strategies that would require students in our required gerontology nursing course to incorporate princi-ples of liberal education, we developed the Life Review Project