Scholarships
The Wouter Nolet Scholarship Fund (WNSF) provides scholarships to health care workers in Sierra Leone enabling them to join a specialization training in one of the key specializations: surgery/obstetrics, pediatrics and internal medicine.
Advanced Training
Why?
By financially supporting health care workers who wish to follow specialization trainings the number of skilled staff in Sierra Leone will increase. This will fill the gap in human resources in hospitals and will ultimately lead to a form of task sharing between medical doctors and clinical assistants.
What?
The Norwegian NGO, CapaCare, has originally developed an advanced training in basic, life-saving surgery and obstetrics for health care workers in Sierra Leone. The aim of this program was to achieve a task sharing between surgeons and their assistants. Following up on CapaCare, two other NGO’s developed similar trainings, each for different medical specializations: German Doctors for pediatrics and Partners in Health for internal medicine.
Originally, the trainings lasted 3 years. After graduation, students got a diploma and were only allowed to operate under supervision of a medical doctor. That did not seem leading to a succesful task sharing. Therefore, the specilization trainings were upgraded by adding a previous 2-year basic medical education, given by the School of Clinical Science in Makeni.
​
Nowadays, graduates receive a bachelor’s degree, become Clinical Officers and are equipped with an operating license of the Medical Identical Council in Sierra Leone. They are permantly employed in one the governmental hospitals and are allowed to perform independently the tasks for which they have been trained.
How?
Applicants for scholarship are selected by an Allocation Committee that uses strict criteria for selection. Besides a Curriculum Vitae and Motivation Letter also the results of the final exams of the previous School of Clinical Science are taken into account.
​
The grant is split up in 2 parts:
1. entry-level grant for the first 6 months
2. advanced grant for the remaining 30 months, including the last year of housemanship.
The entire scholarship covers the personal costs of the students, including transportation, food, clothes, mobile data and communication. Accommodation and the costs of the advanced training itself are taken care of by the NGO's.
