More nurses, please

IF YOU visit any of the major hospitals in North America or England, the odds are that you will find one or more Trini nurses working there, and often occupying senior positions. This, of course, explains why our health service has been suffering from a chronic shortage of nurses over several years. On the one hand, then, we may congratulate ourselves on the standard of training and the quality of nurses we produce, which make them valued candidates for recruitment by foreign institutions. On the other hand we must come to grips with this problem, not only in stepping up our output of trained nurses but also in providing them with a level of remuneration that would not make foreign offers so tempting.

There is, however, another aspect of this problem that we consider to be equally important. While our nurses may want to sell their services to the highest bidder, as health care professionals trained at taxpayers’ expense, we do expect them to feel some sense of loyalty to their own country, a desire to serve their own people, a gratitude to the TT society for providing them with a career in the medical field. More than 40 years ago, we set out to build a nation but something seems to have gone terribly wrong, the spirit that should be animating our people in that great overriding enterprise seems to have fallen victim to the unrelenting animosity of our politics, the materialism and selfishness of our times and the worship of the almighty dollar. The evidence is everywhere to be seen, but still this newspaper refuses to accept the frightening idea that the spirit of service is dying a natural and inexorable death in our country. And that is why we must appeal to the gradutes coming out of our nursing school to think about their country, to find a satisfaction in serving their own people, their own society, that has a value which cannot be equated in dollars and cents.

We find the statistics of the nursing shortage given to the Senate on Tuesday by Health Minister John Rahael quite distressing. There is actually a shortfall of 1,133 nurses in TT’s health service, with only 2,123 of the 3,257 established positions being filled. According to the Minister, this inadequacy has impacted on operations at several hospitals, including Port-of-Spain General where the maternity wards had to be merged over the last two years. At St Ann’s, supervision of nursing students and subordinate staff was affected. At Sangre Grande, the paediatric ward had to be shut down. At Mt Hope, Cuban nurses had to be assigned to the Intensive Care Unit for the reintroduction of open heart surgery. At the Women’s Hospital, midwives and students had to prove health care at the Birth and Neonatal units.

Minister Rahael, in responding to a question in the Senate, announced a number of ways of solving the problem. Government, he said, was considering the recruiment of nurses from abroad while, at the same time, efforts are being made to train more nurses locally. The Minister is hoping also to re-employ retired nurses to serve in the outreach health centres which are being established in rural areas to provide primary care and so ease the burden on the main hospitals. In addition, a two-year training programme is to be established at the University of the West Indies for which 30 scholarships will be awarded each year, as a means of encouraging young people to train as nurses. In quest to meet this need, it is disappointing to learn that the country’s education system has proven to be a basic handicap, since more than 50 percent of students fail the examinations every year. Still, the standard must be maintained, regardless.