Improve training, welfare for nurses

The Uganda Nurses and Midwives Education Board (UNMEB) released results for exams that were sat in 2016 showing a drop in the performance compared to that of 2015. Overall, 51.7 per cent passed and got certificates, while 61 per cent passed and were awarded diplomas. Most passed with credits; there were few distinctions.
It is important that more is invested in the nursing and midwifery section in this country. For most patients, nurses are the first port of call when they get into a health centre, especially the government-run centres. Although the doctors crucially provide the diagnosis and initial treatment, the nurses have the important task of communicating between the patients and doctors, providing continuous assessment and giving medicine to the patient.

They deal with people at the lowest of moments, when terribly ill, unable to ease or feed themselves and in all sorts of frankly embarrassing and helpless situations. There is no doubt that there is need for more nurses and midwives to be trained and allocated to different health units across the country. Reports have been made of how in some centres, there is only one midwife for so many women giving birth. They work under strenuous conditions, sometimes having to deliver children with the help of a torch or candle light because there is no power. It is also no secret that they are not well-paid for the work they do and many times have to deal with irate, worried and difficult patients.

Ms Helen Mukakarisa Kataratambi, the UNMEB executive secretary when presenting the 2016 results last Friday, said most institutions have inadequate numbers of tutors and asked the government to improve the human resource in these departments. For a profession whose teaching and training began in the country in 1917, when the first nursing and midwifery School was opened, a lot more should have been done, especially because healthcare is still relatively low and people struggle to get proper attention for various reasons.
Further, the minister of Education Ms Janet Museveni, was right when she advocated for the nursing curriculum to have ethical training prominent in handling patients. Nurses are expected to be calm in chaotic situations, patient with impatient people, gentle but firm with lazy and fearful patients. The list is long.
Like teachers, counsellors and such professions, the public looks to nurses as those with a “human” face, those who will treat them with care when even their closest relative does not want to. There is therefore need to improve the resources for this good profession.