What about promotion for nurses

THE EDITOR: To the Honourable Minister of Health Mr John Rahael Sir: I am using this medium to relay some facts about the sorry state of our nursing profession and the plight of our senior nurses who have opted to stay in the system and in the Ministry of Health. Several of our nurses in the Maternity Department and Central Block are continually being used and abused. We are forced to do supervisory work without any compensation. We supervise night shifts and evening shifts and in the case of the Maternity Department, run the whole department, which could be very challenging at times.

Mr Minister, when are you going to give us our first clue? There are no head nurses in the Maternity Department. All the wards: 301, 302, Maternity Theatre, District Services, Ante Natal Clinic and Labour Ward are all being run by senior nurses who get no acting allowance whatsoever. Do we have to call in Anand Ramlogan to fight our cause? There have not been promotions for head nurses for years. Is it because we are a profession of mainly women that is being headed by a woman that we are being discriminated against? Some of us have been running these wards for years, why can’t we be promoted or at least get an acting allowance.

Some of our colleagues resign as Head Nurses and Head Supervisors and would you believe are re-employed by the Regional Health Authorities in the same senior positions? So you see the young nurses are becoming frustrated because they see no upward mobility on the horizon. How could a nurse who resigned as a Head nurse and made her 33 1/3 years of service be re- employed as a Nursing Supervisor? Something is dramatically wrong with our health system. Everyone gets promoted, policemen, doctors, prison officers, teachers, but nurses do the work and never get promoted. The ball is in your court Mr Minister.

JUANITA BARROW
Registered Nurse/Licensed mid wife St James