Following the deaths of seven day old Andy Jones Jr. and six month old Evander Sho and the allegations that the babies died due to negligence in the health care system in the south 7News found out today that it is not only the Ministry of Health, the Belize Nursing Association has also been doing its own probe. Lydia Blake, the President of the Association, told us that for sometime now the nursing profession has been struggling with a number of problems. And now the Belize Nursing Association has called for an emergency meeting on Saturday.
Lydia Blake, President – Nursing Assoc.
“This Saturday we are calling the executive meeting to go over what issues we had gathered from the districts. We are calling on a representative from Punta Gorda to come to the meeting for them to discuss what is going on, what is their issues, what is the overall issue. The bottom line as we are seeing it for now is it is just staff shortages but we cannot conclude that, we need to see all aspects and then sometime next week, as early as Monday, we think we are going to call a press conference on behalf of the Nursing Association. We are planning to do our own investigation. We already started because we went to PG in January and we knew what issues the nurses were facing.”
Jacqueline Godwin,
What are those issues?
Lydia Blake,
“Well I wouldn’t want to contemplate on it at the moment because I’ve already called an emergency meeting for Saturday. I have spoken with the President of the Punta Gorda branch after the first incident occurred and then I forwarded my thing to the Ministry of Health but they said they were doing their investigation so I was just giving them time to do their investigation because I didn’t want to go as if I am going against them. It is all for the betterment of one, the health for Belize. But now they have a second incident occurring and we have top step in, if they want our help or not. We have to step in as an association because we are the voice of the nursing profession in a whole of Belize.
Nursing is a profession and nursing is to be considered as a profession, it is not just a job. It is a vocation, it is a call. With the nurses that are coming out from UB, they are coming out with a Bachelor’s yes in nursing. They have the theory part of nursing but they are lacking practice because when we had our Nursing School you used to go three days to school and then the other two days was you will spend either in the practice room or in the hospital setting. The nurses, majority have to go to Belmopan and then come back to Belize City to find the time to go to Karl Heusner which is the major in service training hospital to get that practice and because of all the Karl Heusner being under the board and the University of Belize finds it difficult to get that practice as when nursing was directly under the health system directly from Ministry of Health to the hospitals.”
And in other nursing news, on Friday nurses will be holding a turkey sale. The building is estimated to cost forty thousand dollars.
