Establishing a faith-based organisation nursing school within a national primary health care programme in rural Tanzania: an auto-ethnographic case study

BACKGROUND: In 2007, the Tanzanian government called for improvements in its primary health care services. Part of this initiative was to accelerate the training rate for nurses qualified to work in rural areas. The aim of this study was to reflect on the issues experienced whilst establishing and implementing a faith-based organisation (FBO) nursing school and make recommendations for other similar initiatives. DESIGN: This paper describes an auto-ethnographic case study design to identify the key difficulties involved with establishing and implementing a new nursing school, and which factors helped the project achieve its goals. RESULTS: Six themes emerged from the experiences that shaped the course of the project: 1) Motivation can be sustained if the rationale of the project is in line with its aims. Indeed, the project's primary health care focus was to strengthen the nursing workforce and build a public–private partnership with an FBO. All these were strengths, which helped in the midst of all the uncertainties. 2) Communication was an important and often underrated factor for all types of development projects. 3) Managing the unknown and 4) managing expectations characterised the project inception. Almost all themes had to do with 5) handling conflicts. With so many participants having their own agendas, tensions were unavoidable. A final theme was 6) the need to adjust to ever-changing targets. CONCLUSIONS: This retrospective auto-ethnographic manuscript serves as a small-scale case study, to illustrate how issues that can be generalised to other settings can be deconstructed to demonstrate how they influence health development projects in developing countries. From this narrative of experiences, key recommendations include the following: 1) Find the right ratio of stakeholders, participants, and agendas, and do not overload the project; 2) Be alert and communicate as much as possible with staff and do not ignore issues hoping they will solve themselves; 3) Think flexibly and do not stubbornly stick to original plans that might not be working; 4) Be realistic and do not romanticise. Embarking on such a project was a timely response to the Tanzanian's government call for strengthening Primary Health Care and for rapidly accelerating the training of nurses able to work in rural areas.