A total of 26 nurses from Cuba are currently employed to the South East Regional Health Authority (SERHA), giving a boost to the nursing staff in the parishes of St Catherine, St Thomas, Kingston, and St Andrew.
They have been assigned to the Bustamante Hospital for Children, Kingston Public, Victoria Jubilee, Princess Margaret and Spanish Town hospitals. Their areas of speciality include operating theatre, haemodialysis, primary health care, accident & emergency, and neonatology.
“The region is very pleased to have these additional specialist nurses to support our hard-working staff as we strive to deliver quality care to our patients,” said SERHA’s director of human resource management and industrial relations Novlin Leslie Little, noting that the engagement of the Cuban nurses would not affect the availability of jobs for local nurses.
The nurses, who are here according to the terms of a bilateral agreement between the two countries, underwent a 10-day orientation, the most comprehensive to be undertaken by SERHA to date.
“The training arm of the SERHA’s Human Resource Department has put together a comprehensive 10-day orientation exercise for the Cuban nurses that is designed to equip them with the necessary tools to adapt to not only working in our facilities, but also the Jamaican culture,” Leslie Little explained.
“We are cognisant that there will communication gaps between our foreign nurses and our patients and so we wanted to ensure that we made an effort to strengthen their command of the English Language, while at the same time introducing them to the Jamaican dialect,” she said.
