Nurses No Frontiers - NNF
Hospital & Health Care - Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland
Nurses No Frontiers - NNF Employees
Nurses No Frontiers - NNF Details
Cancer in adults and severe blood disorders in children are the most common life-threatening non-communicable disorders (NCD) globally. Millions of children live with sickle cell disease (SCD) in Africa or severe thalassemia (ST) in South East Asia. As more people are lifted from poverty globally the NCD burden is rapidly increasing and new strategies aiming at improving access to locally appropriate tertiary care are direly needed. Nursing competency is a critical component to this objective and information technology has created unprecedented opportunities to scale up capacity building driven by global cooperation. This project proposal builds on the Nurses No Frontiers (NNF) collaboration with the EBMT Nurses Group with over 30 years of experience, professional knowledge-transfer through on-site and online collaboration with nursing team building as a central pillar. In fact, BMT is the only curative option for both SCD and ST, is highly successful, restores normal health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in most cases and is very cost-effective compared to non-curative long-term supportive care. These programs should achieve self sufficiency and sustainability thanks to local governments take over. The cure of ST by BMT is thus a model of a medically, ethically and financially justified tertiary care procedure which not only saves lives, relieves desperation of many families and financial burden on health care systems but has cascade effects on institutional capacity, higher medical education, research & development. In many low and middle-income countries (LMICs) the limiting factor to health care strengthening is often not financial resources but rather professional know-how. The bulk of this highly qualified workload is carried by nursing personnel and outcomes often depend on the ability to assure that medical prescriptions are carried out correctly and infectious risks minimized.
