Latest update December 23rd, 2024 3:40 AM
Retaining nurses a Caribbean-wide challenge – CNO Director
CNO Director, Anoris Martin-Charles (third from left), meets the GNA Executive.
Retaining nurses in the public health system remains one of the challenges that presents Caribbean-wide. This situation, according to Director within the Caribbean Nurses Organisation, Anoris Martin-Charles, is further compounded by some welfare issues within the respective health systems.
“Some welfare issues might be general but some might be specific to countries. Sometimes nurses may feel they are not being remunerated adequately so again there is this challenge that affects nursing.”
Also of note, she said, are the challenges faced by nurses who are represented under the public service system.
She explained that while in some countries the Nurses’ Association can bargain for nurses this is not the case in all countries. “When they (Nurses’ Associations) go to the bargaining table they are really dealing with nursing issues but sometimes we find when they (nurses) are represented by the general public service the issues don’t focus on the nurses enough…and nurses have different needs,” Martin-Charles asserted.
She underscored that when the actual benefits are realised they do not focus on nurses. “For nurses we are there 24/7 with patients. We work days, we work nights and we work holidays as well. So there are some things that we need just for us and we find that generally we are not getting it.”
This inevitably has been lending to the rate of nurses’ migration which has been presenting in the Caribbean, Martin-Charles noted. But according to her, to be one of the major concerns, in addition to the lack of opportunity for career expansion.
“As individual countries we may not have the vast array of speciality areas that nurses can go into. So some nurses prefer to go to greener pastures.
When you go to the bigger countries nurses can get to study easier; you get sponsorship for programmes and so some nurses might tend to go towards that.” According to Martin-Charles, if the powers that be in the respective countries would recognise the importance of specialised training some nurses may be inclined to remain in-country.
And it was with the intent of highlighting and helping to address the concerns of nurses that the Caribbean Nurses Organisation was formed, Martin-Charles said. The Organisation is a non-governmental, non-profit, non-partisan, regional professional (umbrella) nursing body of individual Nurses, Nurses Associations in the Caribbean and Caribbean Nurses living in the Caribbean, and abroad. It is the oldest regional nurses’ professional organisation.
It was founded in May 1957 on the island of Antigua, West Indies, and is regarded as a self-governing nurses’ organization, formed by nurses for nurses of the Caribbean and adjoining islands and countries.
According to Martin-Charles, currently the organisation has the membership of about 33 countries of the Caribbean. And these nurses, she revealed, come together on occasions to plan strategies to deal with the issues that face nurses and to plot the way forward for nursing in the Caribbean.
The countries are divided into four regions with Guyana falling into Region number four. The countries in Region four are: French Guiana, Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad, Grenada, Barbados, and St Vincent and the Grenadines.
And it was during the organisation’s 27th Biennial meeting last October in the Dutch Caribbean Island of Aruba that Martin-Charles was elected Director for Region Four.
She made her first visit to Guyana on Monday and met with the recently elected Executive body of the Guyana Nurses Association, at the local entity’s Charlotte and Alexander Streets headquarters. “My main purpose for being here is to introduce myself to the nurses in Guyana and to also ascertain what some of the challenges are so that when I report back to the board I can relate some of Guyana’s concerns and what we can do to help support each other,” she revealed during an interview with this newspaper.
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