Ethical nursing crucial to good healthcare

The importance of ethical nursing was recently emphasised as a crucial factor in the delivery of healthcare. In fact, according to Administrator of the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC), Michael Khan, nursing today “is not very correct in a sense in Guyana.”
He was at the time referring to the attitude of some nurses at the public hospital which he manages. It is his belief that the some of these nurses have some way to go to improve their standard of nursing.
“I’m not saying that our nursing schools don’t produce the same standards but they are far and few. We have to get them back into training to learn behaviour; the way they should talk to people,” Khan asserted.
He alluded to the professionalism exhibited by some nurses of the St Joseph Mercy Hospital, for instance, as the classical standard of nurses, an observation he only recently made.
He related that several complaints are levelled on a daily basis against the nurses of the GPHC to senior functionaries, which he attributed to the volume of patients seen at the facility. However, he highlighted that “I always say it doesn’t matter what you do, it doesn’t take anything, but rather it is free to be courteous and smile.”
And even as he emphasised the need for professionalism at the medical institution, Khan recalled how he was approached by a seven-month pregnant patient recently who related how she was subjected to a bout of ridicule from a nurse because of a prior psychiatric condition.
“You never talk about a patient, no matter what. They have a right to live just as we. If you want to make your comments you keep it aside…but that really isn’t your business.
We all know that you could have cancer today, but then you are treated and five years later you are cancer-free; we don’t say ‘oh that patient had cancer’… but when we have someone with mental illness we say that? No!”
According to Khan, it is a known fact that mental illness is curable, whereby one day a patient can have a nervous breakdown and a couple of months later he/she is back to normal.
“We have to be careful how we talk to our patients,” warned Khan, who was at the time delivering an address to the inaugural batch of the hospital’s Critical Care Nursing Programme.
Seventeen nurses undertook the 15-month programme which according Director of Nursing Services, Sister Audrey Corry, entailed a segment on nursing ethics. She explained that there are certain areas, such as ethics in the practice of nursing that are especially critical for the delivery of quality nursing care.
“If you are dealing with patients, many of whom are not even aware of the nature of their illness, we have to be even more careful in how we take care of them, because they themselves are not able to do anything much for themselves in most cases.”
The Critical Care Nursing Programme was designed with a view to enhancing the skills of nurses to deal with patients in the Intensive Care Unit of hospitals. Moreover, Khan during his deliberations urged that “what you learn should be translated into your job.”