7 Brooklin nurse takes expertise to the Middle East PARVANEH PESSIAN ppessian@durhamregion.com BROOKLIN -- After 25 years as a nurse close to home, Carol McNair is expanding her horizons to enrich the health-care systems of international communities. The Brooklin resident and nurse practitioner recently returned from a two-week teaching stint in Qatar, along with two other staff members from the neonatal intensive care unit at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. "We were there to educate nurses at the facility to assist in increasing the quality of health care for children and their families," says Ms. McNair. In 2010, SickKids launched a historic five-year partnership with Hamad Medical Corporation to provide advisory services for the development and operation of the new 217-bed, 45,000-square-foot children's hospital in Hamad Medical City, a large, not-for-profit health-care complex in the heart of Doha, Qatar's capital city. Ms. McNair originally travelled there for a week in the spring to assess the needs of the neonatal division and develop a nursing education curriculum with her team. "We wanted to learn a little bit about their unit, what they have and what kind of babies they see, because it's different from what we would see," she says. For two weeks starting in early November, Ms. McNair taught a class of eight nurses five days a week on various topics related to neonatal care. One of the biggest issues she encountered involved the credentials of nursing staff in Qatar because many acquired their training from various parts of the world, such as India or the Philippines. "Because they all come from other countries, the nurses all have varying backgrounds and different education so very few of them have ever had formalized neonatal education, which all of our nurses would have to have to work in our unit (at SickKids)," she explains. "Their nurses were all general- ized nurses who then have gained knowledge only through experience as opposed to formal educa- tion, so that's what we were providing." Ms. McNair also noticed that due to the small size of the country, the hospital was the only one that offered pediatric services so patients often stayed longer than would be expected in Canada. "Whereas we have other hospitals around the province or the city that we can send patients to or services such as home care, they don't have that ... so babies would stay in the hospital way longer." All the nurses who attended the classes were eager to learn and expressed their gratitude for the program, she adds. SUBMITTED PHOTO BROOKLIN -- Nurse practitioner Carol McNair, right, of Brooklin, and Heather Urquhart recently returned from a trip to Qatar where they taught nurses at the Hamad Medical City, a health-care complex.