Veteran Nurse, Marva Hawker, passes on

Apr 13, 2019 News

The Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation [GPHC] is in mourning. This development comes on the heels of the demise of one of its longest serving nurses, Sister Marva Hawker.
Sister Hawker, who was 73 years at the time of her death, was also in her 53rd year of nursing having entered the profession in January 1966.
According to reports reaching this publication, Sister Hawker endured a brief illness before passing away Tuesday evening at the GPHC.
The stellar nurse, who was born to parents Maxwell and Irene Callender on February 12, 1946, leaves to mourn her husband of 49 years, Desmond Hawker, and their two children Kathy Ann and Nicolette, other relatives, friends and the local nursing fraternity.
But despite her sudden passing, the impact that Sister Hawker was able to make in nursing, particularly at the GPHC, will forever be remembered and embrace.
Sister Hawker who was raised in Virginia Village, a small community at Cane Grove, East Coast Demerara, served in many nursing capacities over the years, most prominently the positions of Matron at both the West Demerara Regional Hospital and the GPHC.
The veteran nurse, who was featured in this publication as a ‘Special Person’ back in 2017, reflected on her years in the nursing profession during an interview. She recalled having to manage nurses even while facing strike actions. This occurred on two occasions.
She told of how the public service strike action which occurred while she was Matron at the West Demerara Hospital was impactful, but was nothing compared to the 89-day nurses’ strike she endured while at the Georgetown Hospital. “It was a year-end…Christmas time,” Sister Hawker had recalled.
But she was prepared to deal with the challenge. It did, however, help that she, at the time, was an Executive of the Guyana Public Service Union, the very union that initiated the strike action.
By this time the hospital was a Corporation and Sister Hawker was a de facto member of the Board too. She was also serving as the Secretary to the Guyana Nurses’ Association.
As an executive of the union, she’d received some vital training in industrial relations and, she had revealed, “that training is what gave me the wherewithal to cope.”
“The major thing was to have in place, a skeleton staff, because providing nursing care is a 24-hour service at an institution caring for sick people. I ensured that I had that skeleton staff in place, and that made sure that there was no total shutdown.”
Sister Hawker had remembered with pride, “That was one of the successes that I felt completely satisfied with.”
Sister Hawker retired as Matron in 2000, but never severed ties with the nursing profession. “I just love helping people; I love patient care, it is in me,” she’d shared with this publication.
She had confessed, too, “There is nothing more gratifying to me as a nurse than to see a patient enter the ward on a stretcher or in a wheelchair and walk out on his or her own as a strong person.
“You get satisfaction when an unconscious or semi-conscious person revives and you had something to do with it. If our nurses can feel like that, then we are well on our way to having many success stories.”
However, up to the time of her demise, Sister Hawker was perhaps performing the greatest nursing task of her life.
Since October 2016, her services, along with two other veteran nurses, were requested by the Georgetown Hospital to help revamp the nursing system.
This strategic move was one intended to help address some shortcomings in nursing care. Sister Hawker had shared her eagerness to help, since, according to her, it has been found that proper supervision in the system is currently lacking.
Sister Hawker’s passing has, moreover, left a void in the nursing system that the health sector will be hard-pressed to fill.
While a number of plans are already in motion to remember Hawker’s contribution to nursing, a date for her burial is yet to be decided; her grieving husband told this publication yesterday.

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