There were a lot of the green and gold colours of South Africa's World Cup soccer team around campus at the end of June, and for good reason.

The national team's jerseys and jackets belonged to 10 proud health professionals from South Africa's North West University who participated in McMaster's fifth annual International Interdisciplinary Summer Institute, organized by the Global Health Office.

Delegates also came from Japan, South Korea and Botswana.

The South Africans' enthusiasm for their home soccer team was matched only by their enthusiasm for McMaster whose faculty are helping them implement the McMaster approach and Problem-Based Learning (PBL) at North West.

Along with sessions on PBL, educational methodologies, simulated patients and faculty development, the five-day institute included an interactive workshop on interprofessional education. In this presentation, participants learned how several different professionals – a ward nurse, senior resident and home care nurse – effectively worked as a team in the care of a patient being discharged from hospital.

The partnership between McMaster and North West was galvanized by a successful $2 million grant for capacity building from the Atlantic Philanthropies of New York proposed by Andrea Baumann, associate vice-president, Global Health, and Mashudu Maselesele, dean of agriculture, science and technology and the department of nursing at North West.

“It is this type of human infrastructure funding that helps provide the badly needed educational development in countries suffering an acute shortage of nurses,” said Baumann. “Through this agreement, McMaster's nursing faculty is assisting North West in its development of master's and doctoral degrees, opportunities for post-doctoral studies, while enhancing research and education skills along with staff and student exchanges between the two universities.”

With only 3,185 professional nurses to serve a population 3.8 million, North West province – the fifth largest of South Africa's nine provinces – has a dire need for nurses as people struggle with an aging population, HIV, tuberculosis, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and malnutrition. Recruiting and retaining nurses is a major challenge.

Five months after last year's group attended the summer institute, North West held a PBL workshop highlighting what they had learned while sharing the McMaster approach with representatives from three other South African universities.

Rene Phetlhu, senior lecturer and collaboration coordinator at North West University, said one of the next steps is to tease out aspects of the McMaster approach that can be adapted to the South African context. For example, McMaster's emphasis is on small group discussions but a South African class can have as many as 70 students.

“The question is how to divide the students so that every group has the same consistency and each student gets the best out of it,” she said.

Jude Igumbor, project manager in North West's Department of Nursing Science, said that while last year's group brought back knowledge of PBL, this year's group hopes to develop their skills and expertise in this approach.

“The next step is to work with McMaster to adjust our curriculum and materials to better incorporate the McMaster approach,” he said.

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