Nurse Foster paved the way for nursing rights

Valerie Minnie Foster, a retired chief nursing officer, of  the Ministry of Health and Environment, has touched the lives of countless women in a career which spanned 43 years, as nurse, tutor, nursing administrator in the Ministry of Health and trade unionist. At age nine she sat the College Exhibition examination (now SEA) at a time when only four students received government scholarships to pursue secondary school education, but placed in the first ten, and her mother, Carmen, was forced to pay the princely sum of $15 per term to send her to St Roses Intermediate School.  Valerie was just 16 years and nine months old when she joined the nursing profession the age limit was 20 years but being big-boned in structure she looked mature for her age. Also, because of the war there was a great demand for nurses.  This determined young woman also completed the GCE O’ Level exams in the sciences at St Mary’s College evening classes, and later on did Advanced Level physics and chemistry at Queen’s Royal College and biology at the Polytechnic Institute.

Valerie graduated as a Registered Nurse and received the Princess Mary Nursing Gold Medal awarded to the nurse who topped the examinations and best represented the ideals of the profession. The Ministry only became aware of her correct age when, by regulation, she produced her birth certificate, and had no alternative but to allow her to continue working as a nurse.  One year later, Nurse Foster became a licensed midwife, and moved up to Staff Nurse from 1949-1951 and Ward Sister from 1951 to 1957. During the 1954 to 1957 period, she was also assigned assistant tutor to Helen Webber, a white expatriate who had come from England with a wealth of knowledge in nursing education to establish the Colonial Nursing School in Port-of-Spain, where Valerie started teaching all grades of nurses. By this time the Civil Service Association had been formed and trade unionism was on the rise in the colony.  Nurses became members of the Civil Service Association.  Nurse Foster had high ideals about patient care and fought to maintain the quality and standards in nursing personnel and in its delivery of service.

Her experience  in the profession brought recognition of the importance of the trade union movement.  Valerie had a serious problem: “Locals could not get promoted beyond a Ward Sister because expats occupied all department heads.”  Her hopes of becoming a tutor looked dim. In 1956, ex-patriate Matron DI Brown decided to dismiss Nurse Foster when she was found seated at a People’s National Movement campaign meeting in the Nurses Hostel.  The nurses were listening to none other than future prime minister, Dr Eric Williams.  Matron Brown assumed that Nurse Foster was politicking.  Foster stood up for her rights and won her case against the matron, who then refused to recommend her for a scholarship to England to pursue the Sister Tutor Diploma Course. Again Foster stood her ground and after four years at the Nursing School with Ms Webber, proceeded in 1957 on scholarship to London University, graduating from the Sister Tutor Diploma Course. She returned in October 1959 to the position of Sister Tutor at the Colonial Hospital’s Nursing School and by 1963 was appointed Senior Sister Tutor, Central Preliminary Training School in San Fernando. There all nurses had to pass through her hands for the first 12 weeks of  nurses’ training before returning to their parent hospitals.

“I had intakes of 100 students,” says Foster. “I had to teach  them etiquette of nursing conduct, uniforms, mannerisms,  about the human body and its functions, hygiene, most importantly first aid, and the  practise of nursing, all in 12 weeks. I used different methods because it was a big class, taking them out  on visits with certain subjects to make it interesting rather than just lectures.’’ In 1965 she pursued the first National Health Service Planning Course at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, on a six-week PAHO/WHO fellowship;  in 1966 she went to UWI, Mona Campus, Jamaica, on a three-week PAHO/WHO fellowship in nursing; and finally in 1967 received a PAHO/WHO fellowship to pursue a final year, post-basic degree programme as a special student at the University of Toronto where she gained honours in administration and community health.

Foster  returned in 1968 as Senior Sister Tutor Port-of-Spain. By 1971, she was promoted to the position of Director of Nursing Education in the Ministry of Health dealing with all schools of nursing and ensuring that all programmes in nursing activities sponsored  by PAHO, CIDA, EEC, and the Regional Nursing Body of Education of 13 Caribbean countries  met with government’s objectives.  It took ten  years for the Chief Personnel Officer to ratify Foster’s promotion to director from her previous post because the CPO at the time felt that the two salaries were too close on the scale. As usual, Foster did not give up the fight with management, and through the union was appointed Director of Nursing Education in 1982.

In 1980, she went on a 12-week study programme where she observed changes and implications for nursing education and administration in the United States of America, Canada and England. By 1983 she was appointed Chief Nursing Officer, Nursing Division, Ministry of Health and Environment and worked as advisor to the then Permanent Secretary and the Chief Medical Officer on policies, programmes and resources relating to nursing education.  In December 1986, Valerie Foster retired “from a very satisfying experience.” “When I reflect I do not think I would have done anything else regardless of what challenges I faced.  Now, students I taught over the years write telling me how much I made a difference in their lives.  In the United States, the Trinidad and Tobago Nurses Association of America is still rooting for me,”  especially as Foster has over the past two years faced challenging health problems.

Back in 1950, Foster joined the CSA at the same time James Isaac Alexander Manswell became Deputy General Secretary of the association and it is thought that fate worked its way in bringing these two human beings together for they both had the same vision to see changes within the working system of the Civil Service.  Foster met disgruntled nurses at the Nursing School with various levels of discontentment with their working conditions and the Ministry’s plans to change working shifts.  Nurses were working seven days per week, when the PNM formed the government and agreed to change nurses’ working hours to a two shift system from 6.30 am to 6.30 pm and vice versa.  The nurses downed tools and walked off the wards.  Nurse Foster informed them of the consequences of industrial action and addressed other related issues. The nurses proposed the implementation of three-shift system and promotion opportunities which were granted and led to the nurses collectively joining the Civil Service Association.  Foster became chairman of the Nurses Section and a member of the Council of Delegates which was the supreme authority of the association.

In 1961, Foster, as chairman of the Nurses Section, successfully mobilised a turn out of all nursing and non-nursing personnel of the hospital with placards to march with other civil servants against the government.  The Ministry tried to have her transferred to San Fernando Hospital because they felt it was improper for a Sister/Tutor to be so active in a trade union, but was unsuccessful. One Civil Service ruling which had  impacted on Foster’s life many years before, at age 21, when she became engaged with the intention of marrying, was Secretariat Circular No 11 of 1956 stating that married women had to resign their appointment. Seeing her fledgling career coming to an abrupt end, Valerie made the sacrifice to give up becoming a wife and maybe a mother. 

To this day, at age 77, she remains a spinster.  As part of the advisory group of the PSA,  Foster helped to rectify these restrictions on women in the Public Service through Circular No 142 dated 19-6-62, which stated that after marriage government had to re-employ them. In her retirement Foster now concentrates on the Orisha religion which she joined in 1986 quite by chance when she offered to drive somebody to the South Oropouche church.  She had been brought up by a Roman Catholic mother and was confirmed an Anglican in England. However,  she has made her choice, the  Orishas, a Yoruba (Nigerian) tradition, and is Elder Mother Agba Valerie Foster at the Kenny Cyrus Alkebulan Ile Ijuba Shrine in Enterprise, Chaguanas. One of the things she likes about being Orisha:  “We do not condemn any religion at all, and have practitioners of all faiths in our church.”