Exodus of nurses from GPHC continues
… 13 RNs resign in first four months of 2007
By Melanie Allicock
Kaieteur News
May 5, 2007
The Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) continues to experience a mass exodus of nurses. As of the beginning of May this year, thirteen registered nurses resigned from the institution.
For last year forty-five such nurses left the hospital to seek greener pastures elsewhere. Most went overseas.
As the observance for another Nurses Day rolls around, the Health Sector and more specifically, the Nurses Association continues to grapple with this phenomenon.
Administrator of the association, Marva Hawker noted that even as her entity struggles to make inroads in the lives of nurses, efforts are greatly impeded by the high attrition rates.
She noted that in addition to those who go overseas, many also leave to work in the private sector.
Even the retired nurses who would normally seek re-employment with the hospital are now seeking jobs at many of the international health organisations, she said.
As could be expected, this puts an enormous strain on the human resource capacity of the hospital and causes the few nurses who are on staff to be stretched to the limit.
This, she noted, has the potential to compromise the quality of care offered by these professionals.
However, Assistant Director of Nursing Services of the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC), Noshella Lalckecharan, has a different view.
She believes that the migration situation has stabilized. Speaking with this newspaper yesterday, she said one reason for this is that some of the usual countries that hired nurses are not doing so anymore.
She made the point that the resignation rate for this year is below that of last year for the same period. Last year, seventeen trained nurses left the GPHC for the corresponding period. And, fifty-one resigned during 2005.
This year, Nurses Day will be observed on May 12, under the theme “Positive Practice Environments: Quality workplaces = Quality Patient Care”.
Hawker is however calling on the relevant authorities to put the requisite measures in place to realise the theme.
She noted that improvements need to be made to enhance the working environment.
“Our environment needs to be clean, workable and healthy. Occupational health and safety of the nurses also needs to be addressed.”
The Accident and Emergency area is one department which Hawker said this is needed, since the staff there is often made to endure the anger and sometimes physical assaults of disgruntled relatives of patients.
“This happens on a regular basis if relatives of gunshot wounds or accident patients believe that the patient is not being looked after quickly enough or if they want to see them and can't. This also happens a lot on the psychiatric wards.”
After forty-two years in the nursing profession, Hawker is of the view that even though achievements have been made, there is not much to celebrate this Nurses Day.
She lamented the lack of equipment as well as the antiquated types of equipment that the staff is made to work with on a daily basis.
Hawker also calls on the relevant authorities to conduct more in-house training sessions since she believes these are urgently needed for young nurses. She described as a ‘disgrace' the way nurses now speak to patients.
“It hurts me to hear the way some nurses talk to patients in their care. In pain they would call out for them and their answer would be a harsh ‘yes! what ya want'. I am from the old school and we took pride in our jobs and loved what we do.”
She believes that fundamentally, love for the profession has to override the need for money if the Florence Nightingale profession is to return to its former glory.
“People have to stop seeing nursing as just another job and view it as the noble profession that it is,” she said.
In an effort to stem the mass exodus of nurses, the nursing directorate of the GPHC formulated a plan of action last year.
The project is aimed at addressing strategies for the retention of nurses, ongoing training for the nursing staff as well as effective recruitment tactics, among others.
According to Director of Nursing Services, Audrey Corry, a document which will facilitate this project has been drafted. She noted that the strategic plan was deemed necessary because of the high attrition rate of nurses at the GPHC.
Among other things, the plan will address the possibility of implementing incentives and other motivational factors to deter the movement of the nurses from the institution.
“We can't make them stay, but at least we can look at ways at enhancing the quality of nurses that we have as well as their working conditions and so on.”
On completion, the document will form part of the overall strategic plan for improving the services offered at the institution.
Matron Corry also firmly believes that the nurses at the institution should be exposed to continuous training to keep them abreast with the international changes in health care.
To this end, since she assumed the office of the Director of Nursing, she has been forging ahead with programmes to address this need.
The Nurses' Association has planned a week of activities from May 6 -13 to mark the event. This includes a church service tomorrow, Nursing Conference on Tuesday, Human Resource Seminar for Patient Care Assistants on Thursday, and a Community Day in Sophia.
The curtains come down on the activities with the now annual “Nurses in Concert” event at the Nurses Association Hall, Charlotte and Alexander Streets.