We must end the degrading of our health professionals

If it is altogether the right thing to ensure that the country’s health services are properly equipped to respond to what we anticipate to be the incremental demands on it in the period ahead, then the matter of how the issue of external recruitment into our health sector is gone about, including whether or not such recruitment should be undertaken without due consideration is also not a consideration that should be overlooked.

We understand that going forward, there will doubtless be increasingly weightier demands on the country’s health sector at the levels of both the public and private health care institutions. If the matter of the numbers of nurses available to the country’s health services and the issue of their levels of competence have to be addressed then so be it. Further, if an examination of the situation throws up as an appropriate option, the eventuality of recruiting trained nurses from outside of Guyana then, in the circumstances that is what has to happen.

The matter does not, however, end there, and here there is an underpinning of bluntness to the missive issued recently on the subject of the recruitment of nurses from abroad by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that might well be challenged on the grounds that it omits to reflect a sensitivity to what one might call ‘the bigger picture.’

There is, one suspects, a case to be made for the shoring up of several of the service sectors in Guyana in order to enable what we anticipate will be incrementally exacting demands on those sectors. Indeed one feels that even now, in circumstances when our ‘petro economy’ is still not firing on ‘all cylinders,’ so to speak, the country’s health services, at the levels of both the state and private sectors, lack readiness to effectively tackle the health-related demands that continue to be placed on the system.

But that is not all. The truth is that while the seeming sense of urgency attached to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ recent missive regarding the external recruitment of Bangladeshi nurses is clear, no discourse on the issue of pursuing a qualitative upgrading of the nursing care regime in Guyana should overlook the long pre-existing challenges associated with the nursing profession as a whole. More particularly, to place what appears to be a weighty emphasis on the recruitment of nurses from Bangladesh (and here we are in no way suggesting that such an eventuality may not be necessary) gives the impression of seemingly setting aside the challenges that have long been confronting our local health sector, and certainly, our nurses, and what has appeared to be the seeming indifference to fixing those problems.

The challenges confronting our local nurses are well known to government. They are, for the most part, a shockingly degraded work environment, on the one hand and on the other, a historic official refusal to come even close to affording nurses levels of emoluments that compensate for their arduous workplace challenges.

Truth be told, the essence of the popular debate on the issue of the health sector tends to revolve mostly around the physical environment in which public sector care givers work and what appears to be an official refusal to reward those workers in a manner that is commensurate with their exertions.

These days, the pushback from the local nursing profession manifests itself in departure from the sector and a striking out by our nurses for North America and Europe where the arduous job of ‘breaking into’ the profession in another country begins. The recent missive from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the issue of the recruitment of trained nurses from Bangladesh is a transparent reflection of government’s awareness that a prerequisite for attracting ‘worthwhile’ investors into the country is possessing the ability to boast a suitably professional health service. This is one of the considerations of expatriates working in countries that have no previous eye-catching track record in some aspects of health care.

That is all well and good, though it has to be said that the importation of Bangladeshi professionals must not be attended by the persistence of what has been, historically, the habit of casting our own professionals to one side.