And from a public health concern to the heart of the health system….Nurses Week culminated with Belize's 68th annual nurse's conference.
It's a meeting of the medical minds that also bolsters professional capacity.
Here's what we heard about the profession from an organizer and keynote speaker
Nurses' week is winding down and this morning to close it off with a bang the Nursing Association of Belize heard its 68th annual nursing conference. It's a once-a-year catch-up for every part of the industry and a chance to learn in a field where the educational process can never end.
Shirley Cruz, Vice-President Nurses Organization
"Yes, we try to include every aspect of the nursing body, um, from nursing students down to retired nurses and all bodies of nurses, all qualifications of nurses because as you know we have different specialties of nurses so we target every single nurse in the country."
Cherisse Halsall:
"What would you feel is some of the most valuable information that will be imparted here today?"
Shirley Cruz, Vice-President Nurses Organization
"Well, this year we are targeting internal medicine issues and urology, if I am not mistaken. We have been, we have divided the, how to put it, like the different aspects of the nurses week activities and we have been able to secure two doctors who will be here imparting knowledge on clinical issues, like I said mostly internal medicine and of the sort."
And as important as it is for nurses to constantly upgrade their knowledge base, there's also a practical reason to attend the conference's lectures.
Shirley Cruz, Vice-President Nurses Organization
"We use the conference to secure some clinical hours for our licensing because we are required to provide a certain amount of hours to license every year. So, we use that as an opportunity to have nurses collect those hours in order to be able to renew their licenses."
And this year Belize's annual nursing conference had an international guest speaker, a Bahamian nurse who's gone to the pinnacle of her profession. This morning we asked her just how nurses keep the world spinning.
Rebecca Johnson, Region 1 Director for CNO
"Nursing is like, I call it the heartbeat of healthcare, without nursing healthcare you know you can't go anywhere without your heart so without nursing in health care there is nothing happening. Nurses are there every moment with the client, from the, from before pregnancy nurses are there talking to the families and coaching them doing anticipatory guidance in terms of how to prepare for pregnancy then they are there during childbirth as we come into the world when you are doing primary healthcare in the community with immunizations and we saw that a lot of times in the pandemic, when they were doing the vaccines? Can you imagine if we didn't have nurses and then in primary healthcare in community healthcare trying to prevent diseases and you know so persons are not coming into the hospitals and then people have to come into the hospital then you talk about tertiary healthcare, how do we care for persons in the hospital, making sure that our standards and our practice is where it should be and giving compassionate and comprehensive care and of course reliability of services in the schools for our children, you have nurses in the schools anywhere you can think of we need nurses so you can imagine if you just eliminated nurses from the healthcare system then we don't have a healthcare system."
Nurses' week started on Monday, May 8th and will end on Sunday, May 14th.
