GPHC’s Nurse Noschella Lalckecharan is a ‘Special Person’

Jun 26, 2022 News, Special Person

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Steadfast in delivery of patient care services for over 50 years…

“You feel like you have accomplished the world when one patient gets better…so my encouragement is for nurses to look at these things when they need the motivation to keep going.”

By Rehanna Ramsay

Kaieteur News – An encounter with a nurse attached to the Red Cross Society when she was just a pupil attending primary school left an indelible impression on young Noschella Lalckecharan and led her down a career path that she has today dedicated more than half her adult life to.

This week’s ‘Special Person’, Nurse Lalckecharan, shared how her love for the profession kept her through the most trying times in her life and in the country.
Nurse Lalckecharan, the current Deputy Matron of the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC), explained that she joined nursing at a time when Guyana was still a colony of Great Britain. “That was a long time ago,” she said, “the rules were very different, back then.”
“Nurses were not allowed to do certain things, for instance, we were not allowed to enter the profession if we were married or had children it was just not permitted!” she said during an interview with this publication.
As such, the young nurse Lalckecharan and her batch mates were forced to hold off on some of life’s pleasures, at least until they successfully completed their training in the medical field.
It was most definitely worth it as Deputy Matron Lalckecharan now reflects on how the rigid training provided the basis for her advancement in the profession and the career that she has thoroughly enjoyed.

Today, she has not only succeeded on the professional front but in her personal life as well. Lalckecharan is a certified and Registered Nurse (RN) and trained midwife with a Bachelor of Science Degree (Nursing) from the University of Guyana. She has also been trained internationally as an operating room nurse.
Today, while she uses those skills in a more administrative manner, Nurse Lalckecharan continues to share her knowledge to hundreds of young nurses and medical staff who work under her supervision.
Her outstanding service to administer healthcare to the citizens of Guyana earned her lots of praises and a national award; the Medal of Service (MS) which was bestowed on her by President David Granger.
Yet after some 50 years as a nurse, Lalckecharan says her time for retirement has not yet come.
She now has a key role as one of the Coordinators of the Emergency Nursing Programme under GPHC. Outside of her work portfolio, Nurse Lalckecharan is also a doting mother of two children and a proud grandmother of four. She explained that she comes from a simple close-knit family. To this day, she is the caregiver of her younger brother who is visually impaired.
SIMPLE HOME
Nurse Lalckecharan hails from a simple family background. She said that she is the third child of her parents Sookdiah and Lalckecharan of Helena Number One, Mahaica, East Coast Demerara.
She explained, “My parents were descendants of Indian immigrants who settled in British Guiana during the indentureship period. If you notice both of them had just one name.”
Lalckecharan continued, “This was because, at the time that their parents and grandparents came to Guyana, the Englishmen that were registering them didn’t bother to get their names correctly. They just wrote down whatever it sounded like to them in English because there was a language barrier between them and the indentured Indian labourers.”
As descendants of immigrants, Lalckecharan said her parents were involved in simple trade; her father was a tailor and a barber, and her mother worked within the home and sometimes on the farm.

Nonetheless, the family never shied away from academics as Lalckecharan explained that she and her siblings were afforded every opportunity to attend school.
For a young Lalckecharan, that came in the form of the Helena Number One Canadian Mission Primary School, and then the Hindu College at a nearby village where she was scheduled to write the College Of Preceptors Exams which was equivalent to the Caribbean Examination Council exams.
She explained, however, that her schooling at the Hindu College was cut short due to the riots during the pre-independence era of British Guiana.
“I had stopped attending school because of my father. He had feared that something would happen to me,” she said.
After dropping out of high school, Lalckecharan said she began to take various career paths into consideration. “I knew teaching was an option but I loved the idea of nursing more because when I was in primary school I could remember that I met a nurse from the Red Cross. She used to give classes in first aid and so on…Watching her work and the idea of caring for others made me want to do the job.”
ENTERING NURSING
Yet, entering the profession was not that simple for the then aspiring nurse. She taught at a school house in a nearby village for a year and a half and later did a stint at Dr. Prashad’s Private Hospital before she was accepted into the nursing programme.

“I had applied to do the nursing course with the Public Hospital [Georgetown] as it was named but the waiting list to get in was long, but I wanted to do nursing so badly that I decided to take a small job at the Prashad Private Hospital to take up my time,” she said.
Then on March 15, 1969, Lalckecharan received the response that she was waiting for; she was accepted into the programme.
It was an exciting time, for the young Lalckecharan as she recalled that the programme required that nurses were trained on the job.
“We spent three months in the classroom and after that, we had to be in the wards working under supervision. It is not like how it is now, where nurses have three years in the classroom.”
Back then, she said a trainee nurse could easily be spotted and distinguished from a registered nurse because of the belt they were mandated to wear.
“You could tell by their uniform and colour of their belt; the first year wore stripes and a self-belt, second year wore the white belt; third-year wore the green and final year, when you become a registered nurse (RN), wore the brown belt,” Nurse Lalckechran explained.
REGISTERED NURSE
Reminiscing on those days, she opined that the nurses these days have it much easier. “The training was rigid; they were so many rules we have to work and study being trained on the job,” she said. The challenge nevertheless motivated Nurse Lalckecharan to advance in her career.

Soon after obtaining her RN status, Nurse Lalckecharan became a trained midwife. She said that “it is always an asset as a nurse to know how to deliver babies.”
Soon after completing her training, she worked in various sections of the hospital including the Out-Patient Department before she was assigned to the Operating Room (OR).
Nurse Lalckecharan took a keen liking to the OR though she worked for long hours both on the day and night shifts.
She told The Waterfalls paper that her success as a nurse is ironic because as a young girl, she had a morbid fear of blood, and was afraid to see anyone bleed.
Her father would sometimes ask her, “How come you want to become a nurse and when you see people get cut yuh fainting?”
But in time she overcame the phobia to the extent that, having settled in as a nurse, she spent more time working in operating theatres than in any other department.
Back then, she said the salary couldn’t compensate for the work but she completed every task out of her love for what she did.
“Nurses were being paid a little over $800 but we still did our best on the job,” she said.
Nurse Lalckecharan conducted her duties and supervised the younger nurses to help man the operating room until she was promoted to work in the administrative division of the GPHC. In October 2001, the nurse was promoted to the position of Deputy Matron of GPHC in charge of all the nurses at the hospital.
Though she had all the qualifications needed for the job, Nurse Lalckecharan who was just over 50 years old at the time, decided to return to the classroom. This time, she enrolled in the Bachelors of Science programme at the University of Guyana (UG). Four years later, she obtained her UG credentials.
She told The Waterfalls paper that she had to challenge herself to go beyond the status quo for nurses from her time.
“After I did it I saw a number of other nurses who were older in the profession going to further their studies. It is significant because UG was not available to us when we did nursing and it’s never too late to further your studies,” she said.
After UG, Nurse Lalckecharan was selected among a batch of local medical workers to undergo training in Canada. She said that the training in Canada exposed her to technologically advanced OR nursing and equipped her for some of the surgeries that GPHC is now able to do.
REWARDING CAREER
Speaking about her overall experience in the field, Deputy Matron Lalckecharan noted that she noted there are instances that required that she used a lot of compassion.
“For instance, when a patient passes on, you have to show enough compassion to allow the family to grieve, show them empathy,” Nurse Lalckecharan said, adding that nursing calls for a lot of empathy and love for fellow humanity.
She added, “You cannot be arrogant as a nurse, you can be firm but you must be compassionate when caring for your patients.”
She noted that while the remuneration package offered to nurses in Guyana does not offer much motivation to continue in the job, motivation should come from seeing your patients healed and going home.
“You feel like you have accomplished the world when one patient gets better…so my encouragement is for nurses to look at these things when they need the motivation to keep going,” she said.
Amongst her duties at the GPHC, Nurse Lalckecharan is most pleased to be associated with the emergency medicine programme of GPHC. For the successful introduction of the programme, Nurse Lalckecharan spoke glowingly of the GPHC Head of Emergency, Dr. Zulfikar Bux, and Dr. Emanuel Cummings, UG Deputy Vice Chancellor.
The two-year programme for RNs is being conducted in collaboration with UG and Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, USA.
In her capacity as coordinator of the programme, Nurse Lalckecharan handles the administrative aspects of the course. She revealed that the programme that has been in place for six years now has been quite successful.
“We have just registered our sixth batch of nurses for the programme and it’s been going quite well,” she said.
The nurse explained that she intends to support the programme for as long as possible.
“Right now, GPHC needs the assistance and I look forward to helping to train as many nurses as possible. As long as I am able to do so, I will continue to work and pour into them the knowledge and skills I have received because there is nothing left to do now than to give back to the profession, that gave to me, at this point in my life…” she said.

 

 

 

 

 

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