How the nurses betrayed me yet I started that revolution in 1992-94

Dec 05, 2017

Nurses, like doctors, need a new breed of leadership that will revolutionise the profession

OPINION | HEALTH

By James William Mugeni

It is exactly 23 years ever since I was summarily expelled from nursing hope my set mates can remember me I was set 46 and was expelled just a few months to complete my training. I never believed in their notion that we were called by God to serve. I insisted nursing was a profession and being a student with strong views I was thrown out before I got my staff Nurse Certificate. The nurses training was so harsh short of military I just can't explain why tutors are so rude yet training people to be human. The tutors would qualify for sadists. The training that produced moral neutrality in time of injustice. What is making these God chosen people to break silence and to desire to be paid professionally?

A Godly calling saw nurses specialising in stealing drugs, picking syringes and needles, ampoules of drugs, cotton, and settling for multiple prescriptions from doctors every day to earn a living. One very glaring fact is that the nurses have hit a dead end as Ugandans cannot afford treatment the way we used to do administer it where everyone had a cohort of Ugandans as his clients. Poverty is real. Every Nurse was a mobile clinic of some sort with drugs storks under their beds.

In my memory is a period when drugs would leave the hospital through food flasks through nurses. An act that prompted the Government to label drugs. Nurses in their thousands operated using underhand methods to survive for a very long time, a behaviour that almost turned the profession into a dreaded profession.(Abasawo be Mulago)This done at the expense of professionalising and demanding for standards and better pay. The training where we walked in fear of not questioning anything but having solutions in abusing patient care.

This has changed. It is not about the nurses striking. It is not about the doctors striking. It is not about the paramedics striking. Life has become very difficult for the ordinary citizen to survive. We have traded on each other police picking from us on crime, health workers picking from the patients, the teachers picking from parents, taxis picking from passengers and the cycles goes on. Who of you as a parent has not paid money for holiday package? Who has not bought cement, a bed, a hoe, a ream of paper, toilet papers etc. for schools? I remember a very popular school where my children were rejected because I took them with books with their names written on.

I cannot forget the lucrative department of Mulago hospital," the deployment at the emergency department of Mulago hospital is like deployment on the road for traffic policemen!" The Government has no gloves but the cleaners will have gloves for sell. Everything that can sell or you want to sell is there. The Police post at emergency unit of Mulago was another established crime area. Those ones there knew how to help criminals escape from the wards by conniving with us health workers. A criminal on treatment in a hospital is not a car robber shot in the act of stealing. He is a gunshot wound patient and car jerking is not mentioned. You easily escape, if you behaved in the hands of the Police and the healthcare system. After treatment you are either discharged by getting the Police alerted not as a criminal but a James who came in with gunshot wounds was treated and is being discharged. We have done this. You tell the Police Robert who was shot in Nakulabye is going home and the Police will simply tell you discharge. I know stories of cleaners owning doctors as in being the middle men. You can also be an innocent doctor but seeing a patient who a cleaner has fleeced of a million shillings in the names doctor this is my relative.

If the nurses lived by their words of going on strike and setting standards, then the December 15 deadline for the industrial action of the Uganda Medical Association is upgraded to December 5. No doctor works independently of a nurse and no nurse works independently of doctors save for midwives. Besides I need my honorary nursing certificate because you are back at the footing where I placed you in 1994, if you had obliged maybe you would be where I am.

When the doctors were on strike the nurses took the usual moral neutrality. Yet the doctor's strike rendered them none functional. The two have roles that are complimentary not supplementary. And now when nurses go on strike who will carry out doctors' instructions? This time Uganda Medical Association will be on auto drive, medical council, allied health professionals, and the rest will be in. Nurses carry out instructions from the above. You wonder what is legal now about their strike apart from reinforcing the illegal UMA! Which people are treated by this divided team?

In this game there are no victims except Uganda you want to end the game then rise up as a nation not nurses striking, not doctors striking, not teachers striking the place that needs striking is parliament there is too much joking in there. We need a nation. There is no day that I went out and not bought a service or forced to sell a service just to survive. It is worse at the poverty level those poor people sell even air.

Imagine doing things that I wanted us to do by 1992 where would we be? I remember questioning what doing a degree in nursing meant as people were baked docile. Marching in Kololo, going for leadership training in Kyankwanzi all these things I warned nurses about because we reaped what we sowed. We needed staying clear but adhering to the ethics or rules and behaviour that govern the medical profession.

To realise anything, nurses like doctors need a new breed of leadership that will revolutionise the profession are we going to have a well set debate as we saw with the Uganda Medical Association staying clear and articulating things and not speaking in tongues? Come December 5, 2017 we are waiting the medical profession is a building block.

 

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