When Gifty Halidu, a paediatric nurse in Ghana, saw that a child in the hospital she works in was having seizures, but staff hadn’t noticed due to their high workload, she knew it was time for a change. She put her case forward for the development of a separate paediatric emergency unit (PEU) based on her learnings from the University’s PEM course.
“In my current facility, the paediatric ward and the female ward were together in one small space,” Gifty explains. “The same staff were taking care of both patients which I felt wasn’t good enough. Due to the ideas I had been bringing on board, management trusted me to separate the wards.”
The University’s PEM programme was launched in September 2010 to provide the educational background required for clinicians managing medical emergencies in children. An average of 40 students are currently enrolled on the three-year programme.
Gifty started the MSc PEM course in September 2023, achieving one of the University’s 55 Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarships for part-time masters programmes.
Gifty says: “A friend told me about Commonwealth scholarships so I decided to go onto their platform to see which universities were there that could offer me a programme to do alongside my work. Edinburgh’s PEM programme was exactly what I was looking for, as I could do it alongside my work since I couldn’t secure study leave.
“At the time when I checked online, I couldn’t find a record of anyone from Ghana who had gone through the Paediatric Emergency Medicine programme at the University of Edinburgh.”
Student support
Gifty initially struggled with the PEM course, as she juggled her deadlines around her work in the hospital, as well as with the slow internet connection in Ghana.
She says: “My biggest challenge so far has been when we had an internet interruption in Ghana for about a month. Without the internet you can do virtually nothing so that was the most challenging period I’ve had so far with the course.”
But she says the support of programme directors Dr Tom Beattie and Dr Laura Smith was invaluable, along with Stefy Bouchagiar, the Student Adviser.
“Stefy, Tom and Laura are always there to turn to when there is a challenge. When I got in touch about my lack of internet access, they gave me an extension and I was able to meet my deadlines.
“In Ghana, we don’t get this kind of support from our lecturers so it’s amazing to see that somebody wants you to move forward and do well in your career.”
Gaining confidence in the workplace
Gifty is now attending management meetings in the hospital, with senior staff keen to take her opinions on board. As a result of the PEM degree, she had the confidence to tell her managers that mixing ill children with adults was leading to sub-optimal care.
“Professionally, I have gained confidence because I can speak with facts and evidence on how we do things and why they work,” she says.
“I said if we want to take care of kids then we need to separate them from adults. Management bought into the idea and then we had to discuss how to create a space for this in a very small hospital. We managed to find a space we could renovate and turned it into the female ward and a smaller place where we could set up the PEU.
“My managers were happy I brought up the idea because, initially, children who came in with emergency conditions were sent to the adult emergency unit where they had no specialised nurse for paediatrics.”
Gifty is now training her colleagues in best practice: “We divided the staff in two. I started training those for the paediatric ward to manage paediatric cases so that when we finally had the ward separated, it was easier to move those staff to the paediatric unit. I then started doing training on paediatric management of common cases that come in.”
Hospital management have praised Gifty’s approach to transforming the approach to emergency paediatric care: “The whole hospital and management is applauding us for the good work we are doing there because mortality has gone down.”
Balancing education and care
Alongside her University of Edinburgh degree, Gifty has now enrolled on a residency programme at Ghana College of Nurses and Midwives which is made up of 30 per cent classroom work and then 70 per cent done at the teaching hospital on site. This means that she has had to put trust in her staff to manage the ward in her absence: “I’ve been able to develop protocols for the ward for management of emergency cases with my team.
“After going through the training with them, they now appreciate how to use the protocols to manage patients, and they are doing just that. I’m so happy with their progress.”
Gifty has some useful advice for students who are struggling to manage work with their studies: “If you are a manager like me, you need to learn to delegate some of the work to other people to help you so that you don’t get so stressed out.
“When you have the time to rest, take a break and then continue from there. Whenever you have a challenge, just reach out to the PEM team and they will be able to support you. Tom would always say that help is just a call away.”
After graduating from PEM and her residency course in 2026, Gifty’s ambitions for the future include changing the policy in Ghana: “I wish to get to the consultancy level where I can influence policy making in Ghana with regard to paediatric care so that we can include things in our training right from the onset so that we can reduce the mortality rate in Ghana and in Africa as a whole.”
She adds: “Children can’t easily express themselves so most of the time we ignore what happens to them. I have a personal philosophy that the small early interventions you can give to a child today can make all the difference tomorrow.”
Image credit: Gifty Halidu
