‘A single day to honour nurses’

She served for more than 20 years in public hospitals. The years were filled with hardships, disappointment, disrespect, personal achievements, abuses, accusations, and self-satiation. She remained devoted to her profession – never compromised on her patients’ health. One day, to transfuse blood, she was injecting a branula attached to a blood bag to her patient that she pricked her finger with the same needle. Her patient had hepatitis C.
Since then, she has been suffering from hepatitis C as well. She did not quit her profession and kept treating her own disease as well. She is someone with nerves of steel. Her name is Touseef and she is a nurse. And she is waiting for the government to bear her expenses for her treatment and provide nurses some relief. She is asking the public to give nurses some respect for they are no less noble than doctors, who have been often found harassing them. She awaits relief and respect.
On the International Nurses Day 2001, while the world pays tribute to nurses by only organising seminars and making rhetoric speeches telling about how important nurses are, she awaits some ‘practical and more tangible’ measures. She, along with many other such nurses, awaits justice…
Touseef, who works as the nurse’s in-charge at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, says that the government pays them Rs 500 only as medical allowance while she had spent Rs 0.3 million on her medical treatment. She argues that a political leader, who is supposed to serve public and not be served by public, can get free treatment in public hospitals, while the nurses who risked their lives serving the public did not get any relief in this regard.
Touseef also says that nurses are looked down upon in the country. She said that people treated doctors with respect but when it comes to nurses, people ‘loathe’ them and associate different scandals with them. She said that patients and their attendants not only accused them of theft and mistreatment in many cases, while some also harassed them in hospital premises.
In many cases, it has been reported, that nurses in the city have also been subjected to violence and sexual harassment by the doctors on hospital premises. Nurses, seeking anonymity, report that under such cases, when they report assault to the hospital’s administration, they have to face disappointment when they find that the administration always supports the doctors involved and snubs the victimised nurse.
For the up gradation of status of nurses across the city and the country and for their relief in terms of a better pay package, social respect, better medical allowances etc, much indeed, is yet to be done. And to re-articulate the nurses’ stature in the society and pay a tribute to these selfless messiahs following in Florence Nightingale’s footsteps, seminars were organised all over the city in which distinguished speakers spoke on the cause.
Such a seminar was organised by Young Nursing Association (YNA) at Alhamra, The Mall Lahore on Thursday, in which the participant nurses showcased different tableau and skits, highlighting the nurses’ cause. Prominent speakers addressed the seminar. Nurses demanded a better pay package from the government and asked to hire more nurses and fill in the vacant seats of nurses in the Punjab so that the nurse to patient ratio could improve and the existing nurses who are overworked may be given some relief.
Senior Advisor to Chief Minister Sardar Zulfiqar Khosa was invited to be the chief guest on the occasion, but he did not show up. Nurses criticised the Khosa’s absence, saying that whenever they needed government’s support, the officials were not there. YNA General Secretary Rozeena Manzoor told Pakistan Today that about 20,000 staff nurses serving all over the Punjab were not considered ‘noble’. She said that according to the World Health Organization (WHO) standard, there should be one nurse for 10 patients but in Pakistan, due to the acute shortage of staff nurses, about one staff nurse provided treatment to 83 patients.
Jinnah Hospital Nursing Superintendent Nusrat Siddique said that not only the public criticised nurses, the nurses’ family members too showed no respect. She told that a number of nurses are refused marriage because of their profession and different accusations that people make to these nurses. She said that many have to leave this profession too to ‘cleanse’ their name and live a happy matrimonial life.
An official in the Punjab Health Department told Pakistan Today that Pakistan had a nurse-to-population ratio of 1:32000 in 1960, and it improved to 1:5199 in 1997. He said that Pakistan faced an acute shortage of doctors, nurses and dentists, and advised that the number of nurses/midwives would be increased from 25,000 to 75,000. Health Parliamentary Secretary Dr Saeed Elahi said that the country had 130,000 doctors, 30,000 nurses and 25,000 dentists and the numbers were far below than what was required. He said Pakistan needed about 70,000 nurses and 80,000 dentists.
The federal health ministry officials told Pakistan Today that the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Complex (JPMC), Karachi, and Sheikh Zayed Hospital, Lahore, had been ordered to start evening classes in their nursing colleges to increase the number of nurses. Sir Ganga Ram Hospital Medical Superintendent Dr Ijaz Sheikh said that nurses were the backbone of the country’s health sector and they should be allowed to serve as long as they wanted to. He said nursing had become a specialized discipline. “It is time we produced specialized nurses, particularly for trauma, cardiac theatre and burn units, the age limit for retirement of nurses could be increased on the basis of their mental and physical health,” he said.
District Health Officer (DHO) Dr Haq Nawaz Bharwana said that the capacity of the nursing and midwifery sector could be increased by maximizing their utilization and improving their work environment. He suggested that more nurses and midwives should be made available for healthcare. It called for a coordinated approach to strengthen nursing and midwifery services, acknowledging that they were needed most in crises or conflicts.