NURSES TO THE RESCUE

The news that “a significant number of Caribbean nurses” residing in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom may be willing to take up employment with the Regional Health Authorities (RHAs) is welcome, particularly as they will bring to the table not merely experience, but specialised training in a needed range of fields. Efforts are being made to fill some 1,000 nursing vacancies, which will provide for an improvement in the quality of nursing care at RHA hospitals, including the waiting time between patients in the wards requesting attention and receiving it. As a result, the filling of these vacancies, along with the programme to recruit doctors from overseas, will permit the re-opening of closed hospital wards and an expansion of needed hospital services.

The nurses are said to have pointed out that they would need contracts embodying the right combination of terms and conditions. What the RHAs will need to do is to have a serious look at the terms and conditions being requested and specifically in the case of salaries, carefully work out classification and compensation packages geared to the nurses’ levels of training and experience as well as the relative importance of the respective jobs they will be required to perform. Understandably, any yardstick employed cannot be on the basis that nurses, who may have been trained in different areas of health care, whether as theatre nurses, mental health nurses, general hospital nurses and health visitors will necessarily be offered the same remuneration package. Yet at the same time, nurses, and we believe the emphasis of the recruitment thrust is geared to that of retired nurses approached and/or responding to general advertisements should not expect the same levels of remuneration received in the hospitals where they had worked. Trinidad and Tobago after all is a Third World country, with nowhere near the resources and/or revenues of the nurses’ countries of domicile.

Should Trinidad and Tobago and Caribbean nurses be recruited in the United States of America they will undoubtedly bring with them a higher upgrading of efficiency than exists here. While the question of a nursing degree is still in its relative infancy in Trinidad and Tobago, nurses in the United States are required to have university degrees in nursing. In turn US hospitals demand of their nursing staff a regular updating of efficiency, even in the case of nurses who have retired and have been called back out to duty on an ongoing basis. This includes attending nursing seminars at which they can keep themselves up to date with respect to the latest in their fields. A point worth noting is that individuals active in the nursing profession above the age of 60, the normal retirement age in Trinidad and Tobago, still qualify for and are appointed to senior positions at hospitals.

The Ministry of Health and the Regional Health Authorities should seriously consider utilising the skills of some of the trained and experienced nurses not simply for ward duty, including at the supervisory level, but as lecturers in nursing. Additionally, depending on their qualifications, they should seek to have them employed on contract at the University of the West Indies and/or the proposed University of Trinidad and Tobago as lecturers in any nursing degree programme. Whatever the area for which the Caribbean nurses are chosen, the Ministry of Health and the Regional Health Authorities should lay needed stress on the optimum utilisation of their skills and experience.