Mandira Baniya

Nurse Supervisor, Nepal

Mandira Baniya is a Nurse Supervisor at the Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Center (SIRC) in Nepal. She was awarded a 2018 travel grant to attend the ISCoS Meeting in Sydney, Australia. 

“I am a nurse supervisor in a spinal injury rehabilitation center located near Kathmandu in Nepal. In a country like Nepal with very few specialized services for SCI population, only a few studies are conducted, and many remain unpublished. It is also difficult to get access to international platforms where we can share our work and learn from others.

“I presented a poster of an implementation project on bladder management after spinal cord injury in Nepal. Since SCI management requires a multidisciplinary approach, I am interested to learn about the activities of other health professionals apart from nursing. A new experience for me was the ‘rapid-fire rounds’ and I attended some sessions. One of them was on hand functioning after hand surgeries among tetraplegics, where I learnt some differences between the outcomes of nerve and tendon transplant surgeries. I was also invited to present at a workshop about my workplace in Nepal regarding the development and functioning of an SCI rehabilitation center in a low resource setting.

“The SRI had organized a gathering on the second day where the grant recipients met with the SRI team. Associate Professor Doug Brown shared the aims of SRI and about SCoRH. We exchanged our experiences, current projects, plans and possibilities of collaborative research for example in Bangladesh and Nepal. I was delighted to interact with experts in the areas of neurogenic bladder, quality of life and pain management. They motivated the new researchers like us to continue working in our interested areas, and I felt fortunate to know that the experts were open to guide us in our projects or collaborate with other professionals if we need.” (Report extract).