Hopkins Nursing Center Offers E-Support to Nurses, Midwives in Haiti

By Dave Alexander

In the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing PAHO/WHO Collaborating Center has been actively assisting Haitian nurses and midwives from afar, gathering nursing education materials and making them available electronically.

As co-director of the Collaborating Center, Associate Professor Patricia Abbott, PhD, RN, manages the Global Alliance for Nursing and Midwifery (GANM), an electronic community of practice specifically designed to deliver information for nurses and midwives in low-resource settings. After the earthquake, the Center began an effort to collect nursing education materials, translate them into French and Creole and make them available to the nurses and midwives in Haiti electronically.

“We are getting educational material contributions for Haiti from some of the most desperately needy places in the world,” Abbott said. Materials have come from nations across the globe, including Japan, Afghanistan, Brazil, Pakistan, Nepal, and Somalia.