Last week, the health of the entire country seemed to be under dire threat when the KHMH union threatened a walkout. And, while fortunately that never happened, it's likely lit the spark of unrest at other health facilities nationwide.
Case in point, the Southern Regional Hospital, where yesterday there was a sort of lighting strike protest flare-up among nurses.
Our colleagues from DYFA Garifuna Radio were there to witness it, and we have a clip of what they posted on Facebook as the situation evolved in real time:
Nurse
"Basically we are here at the southern regional hospital, um, just demonstrating the um the discomfort and the unrest again concerning the issues at the southern regional hospital."
Reporter:
"So what are some of those issues?"
Nurse
"Right now we need more staff like we are really working on the skeleton, we barely have midwives. When you come on shift one midwife you will meet for the entire unit. It's really difficult to deal with a lot of patients so we need more staff, we need more infrastructure. If you look into the parking lot like over that side, every day there is a lot of potholes, we need better equipment, we have just old equipment sometimes we have to like we have to -patients are suffering at the end of the day, you know. We need our hazard allowance, every day we deal with a lot of hazards and we have been crying about this and no response from the last time we came out here and, So we need transportation also, we have people, we staff that live in a bush, all of that, they can't get to work when it rains, you know we used to have transportation and they also took that away from us."
"We need our increments back, and increase ambulance allowance for example if you go way to KHMH Belize then you should be paid $50.00 or if you are doing two stops, you are stopping at Western Regional you should be given another allowance because that is two stops and then we are also requesting our health insurance."
"We deal with a lot of hazards every day our health basically from Covid a lot of us you know we caught Covid a million times, you know, we don't have any type of, it really put an effect on our body so we need some health insurance. Our increment is frozen for the past what? Three years so we need our increment back because we work very hard and we have lost a lot of money you know and those things are unfair."
