MOHAN Foundation was invited by Dr. Sonal Asthana, HPB and Multiorgan Transplant Surgeon, Aster Integrated Liver Care (ILC) group, to conduct a Master class on Soft skills, Counselling and Grief Counselling on 7^th & 8^th September 2017 at Aster CMI Hospital, Bengaluru. The Master class was the final part of a three month certificate course in Transplantation Nursing that concluded on 9^th September 2017. MOHAN Foundation faculty included Mrs. Lalitha Raghuram, Country Director and Dr. Sumana Navin, Course Director. Mrs. Lalitha Raghuram took the sessions on soft skills and effective communication for nurses. Dr. Sumana took the participants through the basics of counselling and grief counselling. The sessions were interactive with group activities, videos, case studies and presentations by participants interspersed through the two days. One of the highlights was the experience sharing by Mr. V. Krishnan, kidney transplant recipient who had successfully completed 20 years after his transplant. Mr. Krishnan is a volunteer with MOHAN Foundation. For the participants, he was an inspiration for the new role that they were planning to don as nurses in a Transplantation unit.

The Transplantation Nursing course initiated by Dr. Asthana and his team is a two month online didactic programme with live lectures within India and abroad followed by a one month competency and skills assessment. In addition, there is peer initiated teaching and shadowing senior nurses in ICU. The training is for multiorgan transplant. Nurses also get an opportunity to scrub in for a liver and/or kidney transplant. This training experimented for the first time with a hybrid format of online teaching with immersion for short periods of intense training.

While there were 36 participants (nurses and transplant coordinators) for the Master class in soft skills, counselling and grief counselling, 30 nurses from four hospitals in three states (Karnataka, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh) completed the Transplantation Nursing course.