President of the Barbados Nurses Association (BNA) Valarie Francis-Miller has commended nurses for service above and beyond the call of duty to prevent patient care from being compromised during Hurricane Elsa.
The BNA head said the nurses came out to serve the island’s public hospitals without complaint, even as some returned home to the deprivations of a hurricane’s onslaught.
Francis-Millar said: “They would have worked throughout the hurricane and after because the all-clear wasn’t given [until Friday evening]. So nurses had to stay on and you ended up having nurses staying on at all the different hospitals working both shifts. Some nurses stayed the morning shift, the evening shift and some even stayed throughout the night and worked through. We didn’t have to beg anybody to come out or anything like that.
“I heard them mention engineers and security guards but there wasn’t a problem with the nurses. The nurses at all the hospitals came out to work. The nurses at the Psychiatric Hospital turned up, those at the District hospital, and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital turned up and I think they should have been mentioned.”
Francis-Millar told Barbados TODAY that after working multiple shifts during the passage of the storm, some nurses, like other Barbadians, went home to find that their homes suffered damage from the hurricane’s strong winds and heavy rains.
The BNA president said: “We had a nurse who lost her roof. We had one that had a tree fall on the house and she had to get the roof of the kitchen repaired. But they are not homeless or anything because they were taken in by relatives and we made sure that they were directed to the relevant agencies to get sorted out.
“One of the nurses pointed out to me that she worked the two shifts not knowing that she had damages to her roof. And one of the questions I asked her is if she would do it again and she said yes she would have come into work. (AH)
